Garcia Girls Part 3

After reading How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez, I have to admit, I am still confused. Part one was easy to understand but then part two got a bit confusing and in part three, it was really hard to interpret what happened and understand the story. The reverse chronological order isn’t confusing anymore but in part three, there were many new characters introduced and the events that happened were so hard to remember.

            In our group discussion, we talked about how it was much clearly in the beginning because the author purposely wrote it in the way how the girls remember their memories. Since the one closer to the presents were more vivid, the beginning of the book was easy to understand. And the closer the events were toward the end of the book, the more blurry the details are due to the memories, which might be the cause of its confusion.

            The father really left a bad impression on me. He was suppose to protect and support the family, but when guard came, all he did was hid while his daughters and wife had to deal with the guard carrying guns. I think that he could’ve done something else rather than hiding to show his protection to his family.

            The ending was really disappointing to me because the part about the cat didn’t really show up at the beginning of the book to show the impact of the nightmare and the cat doesn’t really symbolize anything. I feel that it is irrelevant because the guy with the gun and the dog and crazily shooting doesn’t really symbolize anything and his words didn’t really affect Yoyo’s future. The mother cat chasing Yoyo and the baby cat’s unfortunate fate plays no role either. I think that vignette really is redundant and useless because it made the book more confusing and it ended badly.

            The beginning of the book was interesting and it slowly got boring near the end to me. I felt that the author could’ve written a much better ending. I thought that the book was going to end with the family event, not just focusing on one daughter. It was really a disappointment and didn’t really end with something that would be memorable to the reader.