Our next meeting will be on Thursday, June 20, 2024 at 10 am at the home of Arlean Fermanis. We will be reading How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. It is available at Amazon in all formats and at Orleans and Jefferson Parish libraries. If you would like to join the meeting, please send an email to Arlean at afermanis@sprynet.com to let her know. We are asking that attendees be vaccinated for COVID 19. Bring a friend, we always have a great discussion. All are welcome!

From the Amazon website:

Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez’s beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father’s role in an attempt to overthrow brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wondrous but not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways as the girls try find new lives: by straightening their hair and wearing American fashions, and by forgetting their Spanish. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating to be caught between the old world and the new. Here they tell their stories about being at home—and not at home—in America.

“Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas.”—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review

“A clear-eyed look at the insecurity and yearning for a sense of belonging that are a part of the immigrant experience . . . Movingly told.” —The Washington Post Book World