Point of View

The novel is a follow-up to Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, which focused on the Garcia sisters and their cousins as they grew up in the Dominican Republic. In Yo!, Alvarez presents the points-of-view of other family members in the Garcia/de la Torre family and various other people that Yo has crossed paths with in her adult life. Each chapter presents a different point-of-view, some of which are written in first person and some in third. Some chapters are narrated in the present tense, some in the past.

Yo! begins with the perspectives of Fifi, one of Yo's sisters, and Laura, Yo's mother, and then branches out to more distant associations, including the Garcia family's maid's daughter Sarita, Yo's college professor Jordan Garfield, and her landlord, Marie Beaudry, with whom she lived in New Hampshire. Each of these people are unique...