Criticism

     Wendy Perkins

     Wendy Perkins identifies the stories in “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” as glimpses of the family’s experience. To Perkins the glimpses encounter a painful assimilation that the Garcia de la Torre family experienced. She considers the parents an embarrassment to the Garcia sisters because they lived under the old world customs. The parents served as an obstacle for the Americanization process to be completed. When the girls lived in the Dominican Republic, they had a strong sense of identity, but when they came to the United States, everything changed in the way they saw themselves. In addition, their parents did not allow them to fit in the new society by keeping them in the captivity of the old world. According to Perkins, their mother did not qualify as an American mom, and their father was very strict. Perkins as seen focuses on the girls search for identity.

     Jonathan Ring

     Jonathan Ring describes Alvarez as cheerful and strict in character. According to Ring, she is a strong minded woman and reveals herself with her way of speech. He believes that her reactions in conversation are a reflection of the cultural conflicts she faced at a young age. She also portrays much of her life is in most of her writings. Ring has noticed that Alvarez revisits a great deal of politics in her novels such as the last days of the Trujillo regime. Ring admires Alvarez’s personal involvement in her works. As he described, Alvarez’s novels are like animated autobiographies that involve sassy gossip, multiple viewpoints, and forceful political undercut. Jonathan Ring is mostly focused on her attribution of interest in voice storytelling traditions of the Dominican Republic into her works.

      Ilan Stavans

      Ilan Stavans is a positive critic of Alvarez’s “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”. He considers the novel to be a brilliant debut. In his Commonweal review, he claims that Alvarez knows the complications of having a family, and praises her for that humor that she uses to portray the problems in the novel. Stavans also praises the idea that Alvarez’s novel does not stereotypes in drug addiction and poverty. However, there are two things against the novel. He considers the novel as imperfect and sometimes unbalanced. Stavans feels that there are other things that can be done to better the novel. For Stavans, what makes the novel so great are the message and themes.