A Book Written in Unique Methods Filled With Deep Meanings

Questions 1 and 4

After reading “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” by Julia Alvarez, my overall thought of this book is that it was quite an interesting read. In a quick summary, the book was about a girl named Yolanda and her three sisters learning to adapt to the American Life Style over their previous life in the Dominican Republic. In a sense, I feel like this transition between the two different lifestyles symbolize changes in innocence. This book also might sound simple at first, but it is one of the most complicated books I have ever read because of the uniqueness of the writing methods that Alvarez uses throughout the book in order to hide her true purpose.

One way how she formats her book that really catches my eyes is the fact that she written this book in reverse chronological order, and this means that this book is not in order from when Yolanda and her sisters were still living the life in the Dominican Republic to when they arrive to America. Instead, the order of these events are opposite. This made the reading confusing to read because it made it hard to follow the sequence in the book. As I continue to read the book without giving up, I begin to realize the purpose Alvarez writing this book in reverse chronological order in the first place.

At first, I thought that as the Garcia girls get older, the story would tend to get more intense, but this was not the case. Instead, the intense moments tend to happen more when they are young. This allow me to foreshadow throughout each parts of the book that it was going to get more intense as the reverse chronological order of the book progresses. The reason why I think Alvarez made it more intense when the Garcia Girls were younger was because she wanted to emphasize the fact to the readers that when people are young, their sense of feeling is much more sensitive to experiences that they go through. A little kid don't have much experiences in life so each new experience that a little kid goes through would leave him a bigger mark than a person that has already have deal with tons of experiences in their past. This ties deeply into innocence because when a person is young, our innocence is still there but as we grow older and receive more experiences in life, that sense of innocence slowly begins to disappear. What this means is that innocent people tends to feel more intense when certain moments happen to them. This shows that when the Garcia Girls are older, nothing really intensify them anymore because they had already lost their innocence in America.

Another unique way that Alvarez formats her book that I think is really interesting is that she separated significant events in the book into vignettes. Whenever I read a book with vignettes in it, my first reaction is that right away I would think to myself this book is going to have a seep meaning embedded into it. I see vignettes as puzzle pieces and reading a book with vignettes gives me a mission in which I want to do my best to put the pieces together in order to fully understand the true meaning behind the whole book.

Also, the word choices that Alvarez uses to write this book is really interesting too. At times, her writing even sound like poetry: “A breeze blows the white curtains in on either side of her, two ghostly arms embracing her. A room tycoon...” (Page 69) This type of poetic language grabs my attention making me feel like I want to read more. I thought this was appealing because I never read a book with this type of writing before.

The ending of the book really stood out for me: "You understand I am collapsing all time now so that it fits in what's left in the hollow of my story?" (Page 281) The reason why I thought this part of her ending was interesting is that it blended into the whole list of significant events in the book that she mentions in the end. I realizes that each each piece of the story about her life is like a puzzle piece, and by having the reader read the book in reverse chronological order is like she is purposely scrambling the puzzle pieces to make us put each pieces together in the right place one by one to the very end of the book. She wants us to look back at every significant event she talked about and making us solve the mystery of how a person can lose their very own "accent".

In a way though, when Julia Alvarez was writing this book, I feel like she was trying to solve her own story which is why she started out when she was older to when she younger. Since, the recent memories of ourselves is the strongest, it is only common sense for a person to write about the recent memories first and then slowly developing to older memories. This is like when someone loses something, they have to trace back their step to find what they have lost. This is exactly what Alvarez is doing, by putting the book in reverse chronicle order, she is trying to trace back her step in order to truly let the reader know how the Garcia Girls lost their accent.

Also, I feel like the black cat in the third part of the book plays an important role of Yolanda losing her accent. In my perspective, the intensity of how Alvarez describe the experience that she had with the cat and the nightmare that she kept on getting until she reaches the United States shows two things. One, the intensity show how sensitive a kid's innocence is compared to an adult. Two, it shows the real difference between the life of America and the Dominican Republic of how everything starts to change when her family arrived starting with losing the nightmare of the cat.

In conclusion, this book is really unique. I found this book a little boring here and there because of the type of genre that this book is categorizes in ,but I'm glad that I stuck to it to the very end. This book shows me a whole different side of analyzing a book because unlike other books,it made me realizes that there are books out there that can only be understand when a person have read the entire book. The true meaning of the author's intention of writing this book and how the different fragments within each of the vignettes in the book fitted together like a strange puzzle. This is one of those books that really makes a person think. Since this book is not only spitted into vignettes but also written in reverse chronological order, I would only recommend this book to people that really like to think really deeply into a material of a book.