The Garcia Girls Three

     I have to admit that the ending of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez was a bit of a disappointment. I thought that the book would end on an interesting note or something like that; however, reality proved to differ. The book had to end with a vignette about a girl, a kitten, and a drum - hate to say this sarcastically, but that is a very dramatic ending for a book that was branded "confusing". The ending does not essentially explain anything.
     For one, I thought that the third section of the book should show how the Garcia Girls became who they are in the second section but it does not. I can see how the first vignette of the third section can lead to the second section because it relates to the reason to why the Garcia family had to leave the Dominican Republic in the first place, but I do not see how the remaining four vignettes relate to the transition between the two countries. In short, the last four vignettes seemed to be unrelated to what the rest of the book seemed to be about.
     On the other hand, I think the last vignette of the third section, The Drum, may relate a bit to Yolanda growth. The vignette is about how Yolanda finds this litter of kittens and wants one of them so she dumps the cat into her drum and makes a racket as she goes home so that the mother cat does not notice her kidnapping the kitten. When she gets home, Yolanda gets tired of the kitten and cold-heartedly abandons it by tossing it into the garden and ignoring it. The vignette does not explain if the kitten dies or not, but it notes that Yolanda begins to have nightmares about the mother cat haunting her. Then it says that Yolanda has these nightmares on and off for years and finally disappears when the family moved to the United States but it still occasionally reappears in Yolanda's stories and art. I think this last vignette may hint at this memory reappearing in front of Yolanda and influencing her life slightly, but not enough to prevent her from fulfilling her goals.