Vincent's First Impression of "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents"

When I first started reading “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” by Julia Alvarez, my first impression of the book was that it was really confusing. There were sections of the book that didn't really make sense because the author tends to change names for each character every time she had the chance and she would skip around a lot without warning the reader ahead of time. Mr. Sutherland told us that the author of this book is doing this on purpose and we should just stick to it, and eventually the reading will start to unravel itself until it make complete sense. As I finished the first section of this book, I feel like he was right.

This book is separated into vignettes, and I thought this was interesting for the author to do that because it reminded me of a book that I read last year called “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros. In my opinion, I really like books that is structure in vignettes because usually when books have vignettes in them, it means that book has a deep meaning within them. I believe each vignette symbolizes a small piece of a jigsaw puzzle connecting to one another to make a bigger picture in the end. Whenever I begin to start reading an vignette within this book, things start to become confusing, but as I continue to hold onto the book without giving up like Mr.Sutherland told us to do, the reading did become easier to understand.

The way how Alvarez wrote this book is really interesting too. At times, her writing actually 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. She also describe each of the characters' story within their respective vignette marvelously by giving fantastic details for each one. Overall, although it seems a bit confusing at times, this book is actually quite an interesting read so far.