Title: How the Garcia
girls lost their accents
Author: Alvarez, Julia
Age range: 14 and older
Booktalk Author: Susan Harloe
Yolanda, her parents, and her 3 sisters left the Island -- the Dominican Republic -- when she was just a little girl. One of her earliest memories of her new home in New York is the nuns at her school: "hefty women in long black gowns and bonnets that made them look peculiar, like dolls in mourning...I liked them a lot," says Yolanda. She remembers first learning about the strange white dots that fell from the sky -- that they weren't nuclear fallout (the U.S. was in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis), but instead, a new and strange marvel: snow.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents brings us nor only Yolanda and her first year in a New York Catholic school, but takes us back through the memories of Fifi, Sandra, and Carla --along with Yolanda, their Mother calls them "the four girls". Mami color codes their clothing -- each girl has the same party dress, school clothes, underwear, toothbrush, bedspread, nightgown, plastic cup, towel, brush, and comb set as the other three, but "the first girl brushed in yellow, the second one boarded the bus in blue, the third one slept in pink, and the baby did everything she pleased in white."
They take turns being the wildest: Fifi tries smoking in the bathroom with the shower running, Carla wants to experiment with hair removal cream (Mami threw a fit, saying that once you got started on that road, there was no stopping -- the hairs would grow back thicker, uglier each time. She made it sound like drinking or drugs.") Yolanda brings the book Our Bodies, Our Selves home from school, much to Mamma's displeasure, and Sand stays out all night.
The "four girls" also take turns in telling the stories of their stunning experiences in their new country: Carla meets a frightening pervert on the way home from school, where she has already been tormented by a gang of American boys; Sand watches an over-made-up woman come on to her father in a nightclub; Fifi's Americanized experiences get her in trouble with Manuel, her summer boyfriend back on the Island; and Yolanda weaves everyone's story together, taking us back in time to the beginning: the last-day-on-the-Island. Slowly, the Garcia girls reveal to us the terror of half memories, when the girls' father had to sit silently for hours in a darkened closet, praying that his little girls would not betray his hiding place to the secret police who have come looking for him.