- For what audience(s) is this book intended, and how can you tell? (In other words, for whom would you recommend this book?)
- What are the weaknesses of this book, in your opinion?
- Pick a character that interested you and write about them in depth. You can also analyze a relationship between two different characters.
Immigrants from all over the world look to America as the land of opportunity. They come to America in search of a better life. In How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez, the Garcia family flees the Dominican Republic due to the governmental dictatorship that was occurring there. They sacrifice everything they ever achieved in the Dominican Republic and immigrate to America to start a new life. But the pathway in starting this new life in America doesn’t go in a way they would have hoped. As the Garcia girls grow up, they become accustomed to American customs and learn to live independent on themselves rather than relying on their parents on decisions they make. This worries the parents, who wish to keep it the way they handle it back in the Dominican Republic. Throughout the book, the parents, Carlos and Laura, and their children, Yolanda, Sofia, Carla, and Sandra, struggle with maintaining their lives in a country so different than the one they all started their lives in.
I thought that this book was particularly intended for younger audiences, specifically girls. I say this because the book tells a story of immigrants of four young girls from the Dominican Republic and what they experience as they get older in the America. As young children in a whole new environment from the Dominican Republic, the Garcia sisters end up accustomed to the new American life but unfortunately they follow the wrong example. They begin to date boyfriend after boyfriend, smoke weed, and disobey their parent’s authority. Their parents have come to America in search of the American dream but instead got a big mess out of it instead.
Once again, I say that this book was intended for young girls so that they can learn from the Garcia girls’ mistakes. They can learn from the mistake of Sofia, sometimes referred to as Fifi, of avoiding the message of dating boy after boy nonstop. They can learn from avoiding the hobby of smoking weed in their free time, leading to unwanted outcomes. They can learn from Yolanda’s struggles in writing a speech herself rather then plagiarizing someone else’s work. These actions by the Garcia girls can all lead as inspirations to young female readers to follow and but also not follow as well.
Another audience this book might be intended for are immigrants coming to America. Just like young girls, immigrants are just as confused about American life as young children are about how life works. This book goes through the typical problems that immigrants go through when becoming accustomed to American life. It provides a view from both the parent immigrant and also from the children immigrant views.
I noticed there were a number of weaknesses all over the place. One weakness that stood out to me was her method of incorporating Spanish words throughout the text. What made it even more confusing was the fact that many of the Spanish words incorporated into the book were never fully defined in English, adding more confusion for the reader. Reading the book ended up looking like an assignment for a Spanish class in which we have to look up every Spanish word ourselves. This made it very difficult for the reader to get an in depth analysis of the text when it was hard trying to understand the basic meaning of the text in the first place.
Another weakness that I thought stood out in this book is that it was very fast paced. The Garcia sisters would be discussing their adult lives on one vignette and in the very next vignette, the Garcia sisters are in their teenage years. This leaves the reader with very few details on certain parts of their lives and is only highlighting certain scenes in their lives. Adding more to the mess, the author also decided to write the book in reverse-chronological order. Yes, this method of telling a story of four sisters and their family in reverse-chronological order gave the book its distinction from some ordinary boring book in original order but it also left a heavy mess the reader has to clean to put the book’s meaning together. The reader would have to regularly go back to the beginning of the book to connect it to the past and connect some pieces to why the Garcia girls ended up where they were in the beginning of the book.
A particular character that stood out in this book was the father of the four Garcia girls, Carlos. Carlos is the father of the four girls and has to deal with many hardships to keep his family together and influence his children into Dominican Republic ways. Once a well respected doctor in the Dominican Republic, sometimes referred to as “the island” in the book, Carlos has to rebuild this reputation somehow all over again once he flees with his family to America. The starting path wasn’t as easy as it looked. Throughout the book, it states how much it was of a struggle to simply land a job in America at the time.
His four girls routinely get in the way and do not grow up in the way he wants them to. He is angered by their independence in America and wants them to act in a Dominican manner. Unfortunately, things will not go his way if he plans to stay in America, where his daughters are influenced by new things they see everyday around them ranging from school activities to smoking marijuana. Because of his Dominican morals, he has a hard time connecting with the four girls and the lives they seek.
