Rating: 
Summary: okay
Review: The book was good but not very good. It had many flaws. It lost me somewhere in the middle. I kept confusing the sisters.
Rating: 
Summary: How the Garcia Girls lost their Accents
Review: This book was confusing and vague with seeminly little purpose and a low grasp on reality. It starts in the future with Yolands in the DR and follows her and her sister's trail back into how they came to the US. It does not highlight enough the adolescence rebellion that most immigrants have with their parents and it also is just not very intresting. I do not recomend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Read a while ago and still makes impact
Review: I read this back in 1995 and I find myself still recommending it to people. It has even gotten to the point where I don't remember many of the details of the book and have to read it again, but it made such an impression on me that I still remember it as a really good book. To me that overall impression is the most important thing.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliantly Realistic
Review: Reading some of the reviews of "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," I am baffled by people's disappointment with the book. I truly feel that Julia Alvarez crafted an extraordinary novel. When I read it, I had to remind myself, at points, that although the stories that comprise the novel may have been influenced by Julia Alvarez's life, they were works of fiction. I was in honest awe of how real the characters felt, how believeable the circumstances that they were thurst into. A book that resounds with such realism can only be described, I think, as wonderful. Apparently, the main criticism that this book is met with is that the stories within it have no one definite theme - hence, no "meaning." I think that that is the entirely wrong view to take. Life itself rarely has one definite theme, and neither do the stories that make up a person's life. "How the Garcias Girls Lost Their Accents" embodies the idea that life is subjective and open-ended: how you live depends on how you read your experiences. To me, Julia Alvarez is simply a great writer. She might possess a style that not everyone can appreciate, but it's well-worth anyone's time to sit down with "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" (or one of her other books) and discover what she has to offer to us.
Rating:
Summary: Snow=Bad Bad & not good!
Review: What can we say about this chapter? Nothing nice! Although we did not read the entire thing, we read the chapter about "Snow". NO offense to the author or anything but it was horrid. No plot, theme, no point at all. The story was hard to follow because of it's dullness and lack of substance. An easy read, sounding as though it was written by Yolanda herself (a 4th grader). This story on "Snow" was thought-provoking-less! We both apologize to Mrs. Alvarez for this harsh review but we completely missed any meaning or point of the story "Snow". Thank you.
Rating: 
Summary: Why should you care how the Garcia girls lost their accents?
Review: If you like reading books that tell a story, have a main point and come to a perfect, nice, neat ending then you shouldn't read this book. This book contains a bunch of stories about a family and their struggles and how they deal. It brings up many issues that make it interesting to read but it has no plot. Just as a family there is no beginning or end and there for when you write a book on a family there is no beginning and no end, you can talk about family members before you but that's it. And just as this book had no plot but only stories, families have no plot and have memories and each other to stay close to.
Rating:
Summary: Present to Past, Sister to Sister
Review: Julia Alvarez brings us the story of the four Garcia sisters, who are exiled from the Domenican Republic and have to start their lives over in the United States. The transition is narrated in reverse beginning with the present and ending with the past. We also are given different views of the story since all of the sister narrate at different times. I also feel that I have a new understanding of what life must have been like in the Domenican Republic under the rule of Trujillo. The style in which this book was written is unique and refreshing. I truly enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: Losing Accents and a Whole Lot More
Review: How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez, is an in depth look at the lives of four sisters, from childhood to adulthood. In every chapter a different person narrates the book, and each chapter includes stories that help the reader to get to know the characters, and the events in their lives that have shaped who they are when the book first starts.
One thing that I really liked about the book was the way that it was set up. The book begins in the present, with the eldest daughter's return to the Dominican Republic, her home land, and travels from there backwards in time to the point that the Garcia Family moves to the United States. I think that this was a very interesting way to slowly give you glimpses of the family's history, and the events throughout the chapter slowly build up to the main event that caused them to flee their home and family.
Julia Alvarez does a commendable job of packing this book full of culture. Her descriptions of the jungle in the Dominican Republic make you feel like you are alone in a safari, and her use of Spanish in the dialogue suggests that very nearby is a town full of the native people.
The book mostly deals with the problems that the four daughters encountered when they first arrived in the United States, and also when they returned to the Dominican Republic on summer vacations as visitors, now Americans. The girls have an extremely difficult time figuring out how they fit in amongst all of their peers, and do not know why people laugh and talk about them behind their backs, and sometimes right to their faces. I think that Alvarez does a great job of showing the confusion and pain that they must've felt : "Here they were trying to fit in America among Americans; they needed help figuring out who they were, why the Irish kids whose grandparents had been micks were calling the spics." (p.138)
I think that the main thing that I didn't like about the book was the ending. I found that the book was sort of difficult to get into in the beginning because you form a lot of questions that don't get answered until later on in the book, and just when the book starts to get good there is an abrupt end. I felt as though nothing was really resolved in the ending, and I was left with a few questions that I wish had been answered.
Overall I gave the book a 3 out of 5 because although I felt that the ending was to quick in coming, the book was full of funny stories and interesting people which was enough to make me read to the end, and wish that there was a sequel.
Rating:
Summary: Losing Accents and a Whole Lot More
Review: "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez, is an in depth look at the lives of four sisters, from childhood to adulthood. In every chapter a different person narrates the book, and each chapter includes stories that help the reader to get to know the characters, and the events in their lives that have shaped who they are when the book first starts.
One thing that I really liked about the book was the way that it was set up. The book begins in the present, with the eldest daughter's return to the Dominican Republic, her home land, and travels from there backwards in time to the point that the Garcia Family moves to the United States. I think that this was a very interesting way to slowly give you glimpses of the family's history, and the events throughout the chapter slowly build up to the main event that caused them to flee their home and family.
Julia Alvarez does a comendable job of pack this book full of culture. Her descriptions of the jungle in the Dominican Republic makes you feel like you are alone in a safari, and her use of spanish in the dialogue suggests that very nearby is the town of the native people.
The book mostly deals with the problems that the four daughters encountered when they first arrived in the United States, and also when they returned to the Dominican Republic on summer vacations as visitors, now Americans. The girls have an extremly difficult time figuring out how they fit in amongst all of their peers, and do not know why people laugh and talk about them behind their backs, and sometimes right to their faces. I think that Alvarez does a great job of showing the confusion and pain that they must've felt : "Here they were trying to fit in America among Americans; they needed help figuring out who they were, why the Irish kids whose grandparents had been micks were calling the spics." (p.138)
I think that the main thing that I didn't like about the book was the ending. I foundt that the book was sort of difficult to get into in the begining because you form a lot of questions that don't get answered until later on in the book, and just when the book starts ending there is an abrupt end. I felt as though nothing was really resolved in the ending, and I was left with a few questions that I wish had been answered.
Overall I gave the book a 3 out of 5 because although I felt that the ending was to quick in coming, the book was full of funny stories and interesting people which was enough to make me read to the end, and wish that there was a sequel.
Rating:
Summary: Look at us (America)!
Review: Julia Alvarez writes from the heart in her stunning novel "How the Garcia Girls Lost their accents". Based on dominican republic life, the book gives us a chance to reveiw our own culture. The many changes the Garcia girls go through while in the United States shows how much of an impact our culture has on society. A facinating book!
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