How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents - by Julia Alvarez (Paperback)

About the Book

It's a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx, but if anyone can go the distance, it's the Garcia girls. Four lively Latinas plunge from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, where they embrace all that America has to offer.

Book Synopsis

Named A Great American Novel by The Atlantic!

From the international bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and Afterlife, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is "poignant...powerful... Beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory." (The New York Times Book Review)

Don't miss Alvarez's new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, available now!

Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez's beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The García sisters--Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía--and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father's role in an attempt to overthrow brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wondrous but not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways as the girls try find new lives: by straightening their hair and wearing American fashions, and by forgetting their Spanish. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating to be caught between the old world and the new. Here they tell their stories about being at home--and not at home--in America.

"Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."--Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review

"A clear-eyed look at the insecurity and yearning for a sense of belonging that are a part of the immigrant experience . . . Movingly told." --The Washington Post Book World

Review Quotes

"A clear-eyed look at the insecurity and yearning for a sense of belonging that are a part of the immigrant experience . . . Movingly told." --The Washington Post Book World

"Extraordinary . . . The voice of personal and political history as it lives now." --The Bloomsbury Review

"Simply wonderful." --Los Angeles Times

"[A] tender, charming book . . . There is a charge to Alvarez's writing, a poetic intensity, that is truly original." --The Miami Herald

"A joy to read."--The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Subtle . . Powerful . . . Reveals the intricacies of family, the impact of culture and place, and the profound power of language." --The San Diego Tribune