Since its publication in 1991, most critics have responded positively to Julia Alvarez's novel How the Garda Girls Lost Their Accents. This first novel received the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named by both the American Library Association and the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 1991. Many have praised Alvarez's insightful and sympathetic portrait of family life amidst the pressures of adapting to a new culture Ian Stavans considers the novel "a brilliant debut," and claims in his Commonweal review that "Alvarez has an acute eye for the secret complexities that permeate family life .................. [The Garda de la Torre family's] rejection of the native background. . is told with humor and has a sense of unrecoverable loss because, for as much as the Garcia sisters want to become American, they remain conscious of the advantages of their Dominican selves. Hence, Alvarez's is...