SOURCE: "Speaking American," in The New York Times Book Review, October 6, 1991, p. 14.

Rifkind is an American critic. In the following review, she provides a mixed assessment of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, stating that in this work Alvarez "has not yet quite found a voice."

To speak without an accent is the ultimate goal of the immigrant, yet the literature of immigration requires an accent to lend it authenticity and flair. This threshold—between accent and native speech, alienation and assimilation—is the golden door through which the Dominican-American writer Julia Alvarez sails with How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, her first collection of interwoven stories. It is a threshold that, in our multicultural era, many other American writers have recently crossed, including such best-selling authors as Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid and Amy Tan. Yet stories about this experience are at least as old...