The Garcia Girls

     The book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, is written in a unique fashion. For one, the way the story progress is not through the usual chronological order, nor does it include a style where there are flashbacks. The story just starts at a point in time and begins to move towards the past rather than moving towards the future. This style is quite unusual to me because the books I have read often consist of the author telling the story through a flashback or through a plot where the story follows a chronological timeline in order to reach the climax.
     However, the most confusing aspect of this book seems to reside within the vignettes. The author never really introduces the characters and leaves the reader to figure out who they are themselves. This causes a lot of confusion because it leads to no clear or concise understanding of who the character is and what the character's relationship is with the other characters in the book. In addition, there seems to be no connections in the order in which the vignettes appear. The story jumps around and there does not seem to be a pattern. I understand that this may make it seem more realist to the way individuals' memories often surface - out of nowhere and without a pattern - but it makes the story really challenging to comprehend. For example, in the first section of the book, the story jumps Yolanda's point of view to Sofia's, then to the perspective of all four sisters, and finally back to Yolanda. This inconsistent pattern of perspectives also causes a lot of confusion because the reader has to remember that it is a different character telling the story and that each of the four sisters has different relationships concerning their love-life.
     Moreover, the vignettes often more straight into a story and does not take the time to give the reader the background information about what is happening. Although I do not really mind this style of writing the author uses, it gets tiring after a while because it starts to feel painful trying to read a book that requires the reader to think and form connections in order to understand the setting. Books like How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent take time to read in order to grasp a full comprehension.