Author: Julia Alvarez
Publisher: Algonquin
Rating: WARTY!
I picked up this novel (in audio book form) because it was in a list of the top 100 best novels. Indeed, it was number 2, and it stunk just as badly as number 2 as it turned out. If this was second in the list it doesn't speak well for the other 98, because this novel was one of the most boring novels I have ever read. It was tedious and pedantic and had quite literally nothing to offer, much less anything new or interesting to say.
It's told in reverse chronological order (for no apparent reason unless you count 'pretentious' and 'artsy-fartsy' as reasons). It's in three parts for no good reason, and the time periods these parts cover have the most recent time first, like 1970 - 1960, for example, but the three parts are chronological, and within each, the story is related chronologically (as far as it's possible to tell), so I don't get what's with the theatrics over the "Oh look how inventive and artistic we are, doing it backwards" schema here. It just seemed absurdly artificial and pretentious to me.
Maybe that wouldn't have been so bad had there been some substance to it, but the story, which is apparently autobiographical) has nothing whatsoever to relate. It's all been done before. It's supposed to be about a dramatic escape from an authoritarian Dominican Republic and the subsequent life in the USA - how this rich and privileged family which had multiple servants had to come and live like the rest of us do in the USA. How awful for them! And: who cares?
It's nothing more than the boring, trivial, day-to-day life of four girls and their parents. Every character is demeaned by using diminutive nicknames (for the girls, that is when they're not simply dismissed altogether as "the girls"), or oddball descriptions rather than names for the adults - like "the grandmother", "the mother", "the father", "the young man" and so on. I found that bizarre, especially since it's not consistent.
The family is frequently presented as being poor in the US, yet the girls go to boarding school. Really? They must have been tragically poor. Julia Alvarez seems not to have any idea what being poor actually means. OTOH, judged by the state of the girl's legs in the cover image, they do seem rather anorexic, don't they? One of the girls is punished for being in possession of marijuana by being sentenced to the Dominican Republic. Their glorious motherland is a punishment now?! I guess I just don't get this mentality!
I adore Hispanic accents, but that simply wasn't enough to save this from being completely and irremediably bland. The four girls are Carla, Sandra, Yolanda and Sofía, and each gets to tell a part of the story, but why do I care about the dolls they wanted or the red shoes one of them wanted? Why do we care about yet another trope Latino dad who is obsessively protective of his daughter's chastity and disowns her when she consciously chooses to lose it? There was nothing funny, nothing engrossing, nothing heart-rending, nothing astounding. There was nothing. I guess that's why it's worthy of a medal?
This story is mundane in the extreme if that even makes sense. These are the same everyday events which everyone else has to tell and which are just as uninteresting. This was like one of those tedious TV daytime melodramas on the BBC featuring ordinary people doing ordinary things with nothing out of the ordinary happening. Nothing went on here which didn't affect a host of other people in exactly the same unspectacular way, so what makes this story special? Nothing. The writing wasn't even beautiful to at least ameliorate the tedium in some small measure, and allow us to pretend that this is literature, so I can't recommend this, not even as a punishment!
My advice is to listen to West Side of Town by Tish Hinojosa. She offers a better look at Hispanic immigrant life in her song, which I believe can be found on her Homeland album. That's autobiographical, too, and a much better story.
