How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents final book response post (YES!!!)

At last, the difficult journey of reading this book has ended. I am so glad that we had finally finished it. I could not bear another of those Valdez books. In each Valdez book, there always seem to be a main character that encounters a form of rape or murder. It seems to be rare because how could so many tragedies happen so often within a person's lifetime. Overall, I thought that the book was neutral; not good and not that bad.

For the last reading, I thought that it was much better than all the rest of the parts. I learned to adapt to Garcia's syntax and diction. In the third and final part of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, I thought that it had contained many symbols and that there was a much deeper meaning to it. In class, Mr. Sutherland said that the last paragraph was making the book like a cycle where the reader can go back to the beginning of the book again and not be confused like when I had first read it. That ending had really surprised me. I wondered if I had just read the book over again, would I feel the same way? or words just be words? I thought about it and came to a conclusion that it would actually be more fun to read it again.

In the last section of the book there were a few scenes that were basically deep symbols of each character. One of them is when the bank got jammed and that the figure was stuck between heaven and hell. I compared it to how Carla was not able to decide what she was going to do when she had forgotten about it. The best symbol in this part that I thought was amazing was the nightmares of Yolanda of the kitten. In a way, the kitten was like Yolanda and her sisters. They were taken away at an early age and they did not necessarily adapt to their surroundings. Like the kitten, the sisters, too had became lost when they had arrived in America and it had took them a long time before they had found their way again.

Connecting the title to the main theme of the story, the title states "lost their accents." I thought that it wasn't much of their accents but more of their culture. When the family were at Dominican Republic, there was a tradition and a more strict culture. The environment was much more calm and the family was rich there. When they had arrived into the United States, the Garcia Girls had experienced a much more loose culture. They were poor there and could not afford much. Boys tended to tease them and American culture seemed to rely on sex. The girls soon had adapted to American culture and had heavily lost their Dominican Republic culture as a result.