My Thoughts After Finishing "How the Garcia Lost Their Accents"

After finishing "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez, I thought it was quite an interesting read because of the fact that Alvarez was able to keep the flavor of the book to the very end. The "flavor" that I'm talking about is how unique this book was. One thing that made this book so unique was the way how Alvarez ended it. The part of her ending that really stood out for me was the following: "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 summary of significant events in the book that she mentioned in the end. It made me realized that each piece of the story about her life is like a puzzle piece, and by making the reader read the book in reverse chronicle order is like she is purposely scrambling the puzzle pieces to make us put all of the pieces together in the right place at the very end. 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 was book was very unique. I did find this book boring here and there because of the genre ,but after finally finishing it I'm glad that I stuck to it and was able to finish it. This book showed me a whole different side of analyzing a book because unlike other books, a person have to read this whole entire book first until they can fully understand 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.