How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (1991) by Julia Alvarez

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (1991)

by Julia Alvarez

The Bronx, NYC

New York: 31/105

The Bronx: 2/7

   How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent is an example of a book from 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that was both something I didn't like AND easily recognizable as a good book despite my personal preference.  Alvarez is widely recognized as a path-breaking Latina/Dominicana author, with novels(adult and YA) and poetry to he credit, and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent inspired a generation of Latina authors- see, for example, In Praise of Julia Alvarez- published in the New York Times in 2018. 

    Unlike much of the Latno representation on the 1,001 Novels list, the characters of Garcia Girls are not members of the underclass, the patriarch is a Dominican doctor who is forced to flee political unrest in the Caribbean for New York City, the Bronx, specifically.  Alvarez takes a non-linear approach, telling the story in four parts in reverse chronological order. I actually the parts that took place back in the Dominican Republic more compelling and the material set in the US less so.   Like many immigrant narratives, I found myself more sympathetic to the parents, sacrificing for their children than the children themselves, who, as is the case in many immigrant centered bildungsroman's come off as selfish dicks.   It is amazing to me how many characters in immigrant centered fiction decide they want to study to be writers, rather than going to school for some practical reason and then writing on the side. 

  Immigrant children in bildungsroman fiction seem to never grasp that one does not have to study art to become an artist, and that studying art is no guarantee of a career in said art.