The following excerpt offers a mixed review of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, ultimately concluding that "we feel included in their lively passionate world. and we want more. "

It is the vices of the Garcia girls, the four lovely daughters of Mami and Papi Garcia, who singly and in chorus offer the shifting choral poem that recounts their life as "strangers in a strange land." (Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic when she was ten years old. She published Homecoming, her first book of poetry, in 1986.) Privileged children of a privileged Dominican upper-class family, they are forced to leave their idyllic family compound to come and live in New York. Their father, Carlos Garcia, one of thirty-three children, is a well-established professional in his country. Their mother, Laura de la Torre, traces her heritage back to the conquistadors and never forgets to mention a Swedish...