This is a sort of companion book to How the Garcia Girls Lost Their
Accents by the same author. I haven't read the Garcia Girls book, but I
imagine that it is a good deal more light-hearted than this one. In
this book, Alvarez explores what the life of the part of the family that
remained in The Dominican Republic would have been like - life under
the dictator Trujillo. The book has parallels to Anne Frank and Zlata's
Diary - young girl keeps a diary during increasingly repressive times
under dangerous conditions. Anne died; Zlata and Anita live, but all
three were changed by the experience.
Anita goes from
being a relatively oblivious child to gradually being able to
understand what is going on around her. Like Anita, the reader doesn't
at first see what is going on, but the repression becomes more and more
blatant, and, like Anita, you gradually understand.
This is not a happy book, but it is a worthwhile one.
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