Julia Alvarez's "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents"

The passing-around of the point of view between the four girls and their parents, the movement of the stories back in time from New York to the Dominican Republic, the intensely poetic prose of Yoyo or Yolando, obviously the stand-in for the author: all these narrative devices make these stand-alone stories cohere into a vivid portrait of an immigrant family, into a novel. The best story is "Daughter of Invention," which is both playfully poetic and immensely moving in its depiction of the passing of the creative torch from mother to daughter.

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