From the Bookshelf of 2025 Reading Challenge…

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Julia Alvarez

Start date: November 1, 2022

Finish date: November 30, 2022

Discussion: September 2025 Buddy Reads

Why we're reading this: Featured Buddy Read for November
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May 15, 2017 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, era-1960s

This is unlike any book I've read before. Structurally, it's a collection of inter-connected short stories (which isn't the "unlike any book before" part), and instead of moving forward chronologically, the collection moves back in time. Each story takes place some time before the previous story. This is sort of like the Memento of novels! (Except without the murder and tattooes and amnesia.) This collection mimics the way you get to know someone: when you first meet them, you learn about the no This is unlike any book I've read before. Structurally, it's a collection of inter-connected short stories (which isn't the "unlike any book before" part), and instead of moving forward chronologically, the collection moves back in time. Each story takes place some time before the previous story. This is sort of like the Memento of novels! (Except without the murder and tattooes and amnesia.) This collection mimics the way you get to know someone: when you first meet them, you learn about the now, and then after a while, they mention a story from the past, and then a more detailed story that lead up to that story, and another and another, and eventually they're telling you about their childhood.

This is what I was looking for (but did not find) when I read House on Mango Street.

The writing is often lightened with wry humor and ironic dichotomies, such as this scene, after the youngest teen daughter has been caught with some marijuana and chooses to move back to the Dominican Republic as her punishment:

“You’ll be climbing these walls before the year is out,” Carla warned.

We looked beyond the pool at the high stone wall. Down a ways one of the maids had draped her underclothes on the wall. In the cup of a brassiere, his little head hardly visible, a lizard was blowing out his throat as if he had just taken a toke and were holding it in until the small dazed cells of his brain zinged a hit.

And there are many passages that beautifully capture a bittersweet feeling or awkward moment growing up:

Every day, Carla set out on her long journey to school with a host of confused feelings. First of all, there was this body whose daily changes she noted behind the closed bathroom door until one of her sisters knocked that Carla’s turn was over. How she wished she could wrap her body up the way she’d heard Chinese girls had their feet bound so they wouldn’t grow big. She would stay herself, a quick, skinny girl with brown eyes and a braid down her back, a girl she had just begun to feel could get things in this world.

This passage made me laugh, because I have lists of books I need to read, electronic lists and spreadsheet lists and printed lists where I can cross of each title read. And I feel I need to read and read and read, too, because I dont have that much time left. Not that I'm turning into a monkey, just that I have a finite life span. Here, the mother is describing her daughter's mental state before being temporarily committed:

“Sandi was a toothpick. And that’s not the least of it, she wouldn’t put a book down, read, read, read. That’s all she did”
... “She had lists and lists of books to read. We found them in her journal. After she finished one, she crossed it off the list. Finally, she told us why she couldn’t stop reading. She didn’t have much time left. She had to read all the great works of man because soon”—the mother got up her courage to say it—“ soon she wouldn’t be human.”
... “She told us that she was being turned out of the human race. She was becoming a monkey.” The mother’s voice broke. “A monkey, my baby!
“Already the other organs inside her body were a monkey’s. Only her brain was left, and she could feel it going.”

I do not know for sure, but I would guess that The Blood of the Conquistadores was written first, as a standalone short story, and the rest was added later. It "feels" different, more complete, more complex, more characters.

The story is autobiographical, and it must be quite true to the details, because after it was published, Alvarez's mother refused to speak to her for a while. Which makes me think this is very autobiographical. And so I felt a little bad for the oldest sister, "Carla," because she doesn't come off very well in the "adult" stories. ...more

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Dec 05, 2008 Noel rated it really liked it

This book was quite good, and very insightful. It's the story -- told front to back -- of 4 sisters, born in the Dominican Republic, who find themselves settled in New York after their father finds himself in hot political water in their native country. The novel showcases the differences, the problems acclimating to a new country, the horrors of US crime vs. DR political terror, the beauty of both places, the difficulties of going back for visits. I could relate to so much of what the girls wen ...more

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