How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents - Julia Alvarez

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. nPoignant... Powerful... Beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory. --The New York Times Book Review n Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez's beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The Garc a sisters--Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sof a--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. n nJulia Alvarez's new novel, Afterlife, is available now. nPoignant... Powerful... Beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory. --The New York Times Book Review n n Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez's beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The Garc a sisters--Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sof a--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. n nJulia Alvarez's new novel, Afterlife, is available now.n