How the García Girls Lost Their Accents – Julia Alvarez

Rating: 3 stars

I had mixed opinions about this book. I should start by saying that this is miles better than the Star Wars book. But that novelty of reading something substantial didn’t last the whole length. I am at least happy to see that this book has a better rating than the Star Wars book on Goodreads (by .01 points, but it’s a higher rating).

I’m going to start off with a summary of the story. This is a short story collection, but they all deal with the same characters at various stages of their lives. I’m not going to go into too much depth about the story, but I want to enumerate the good and the bad.

The good was that some of the stories were well-written and tied together themes well. As I thinks should be obvious about the title, it’s foremost about four girls leaving their home culture (Dominican Republic) and adapting to their new one (America). Religion, familial ties and the like come up in a lot of the stories. The story about the coin-operated piggy bank was, in my opinion, the best written one.

Okay, the bad. The first is that most of the stories aren’t that good about it. They’re more narratives, and very few stories have much to do with one another so some ideas don’t really get developed like they should be. Also, the book was published in 1991, so a lot of the ideas seem dated by now. Okay, asking a book to be relevant 28 years later is a request we don’t make of every book. However, you have some criteria for books that I really like. Also Kant and stuff, I don’t know.

A big complaint I had is that the family structure feels important, four daughters and parents, but no one really gets well developed. Most of the stories are of one character or another, but in sum you only get what feels like one person that’s kinda dynamic. However, there’s four kids so no one really is that interesting. Some of the characteristics across the stories is enough to differentiate the kids, at least in one time. But because this is slices of time, it doesn’t feel like it. Also, I wanted to know more about the parents, but you’re really only given a superficial slice (the dad is old world and strict but is willing to compromise on his principles in dire need, the mom believes in family but is more practical). What about them? How did the dad become a doctor? How does the mom go from well-to-do life to scrimping and saving in the United States?

My last complaint that I’ll list here is that the book didn’t read particularly fluently. I wasn’t drawn to read it. That’s something that I find about a lot of books. I have to get over the humps to get to the part I really like. However, I found very little attracted me. It was mostly a thing I had to push through because I’d started and wanted to get through it. Not all of it, but a good deal of it.