Book Club Author Suggestion: Julia Alvarez

Brief Bio:

Julia Alvarez (b. March 27, 1950) is a Dominican American novelist, poet, essayist, and children’s author who is regularly published in English and Spanish. Shortly after her birth in New York City, the family moved to their native Dominican Republic where they stayed for ten years, until her father was embroiled in failed a plot to overthrow the island’s military dictator. Forced to return to the United States, Alvarez experienced discrimination and alienation, leading her to find solace in that “portable homeland — the world of the imagination.” She graduated Middlebury College in 1971 and received a Masters of Art degree in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1975. Her experiences moving back to the US were fictionalized in her popular first novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Julia Alvarez’s place as one of the most critically and commercially successful Latina writers was cemented with numerous works of nonfiction and poetry, as well as novels such as In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), Yo! (1997), Afterlife (2020), and The Cemetery of Untold Stories (2024). Her success inspired new generations of Latina/Latino writers, with her eloquent handling of subjects such as acculturation, family, coming of age, identity, tyranny, exile, and more. Yet she views herself as a “Citizen of the World,” and reflects on how “the bad part of being a ‘Latina Writer’ is that people want to make me into a spokesperson. There is no spokesperson! There are many realities, different shades and classes.”

Available Works in the Colorado Book Club Resource

The Book Club Resource has 8+ copies of the titles below (some are in Spanish) available for 8+ weeks at a time to reading groups across the state. The descriptions below were taken from ThriftBooks or the publisher.

Afterlife (2020) | Discussion Questions

Afterlife cover showing a face/tree sillhouette

Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves–lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack–but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.

Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including–maybe especially–members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?

Antes de ser libres (2004)| Discussion Questions

Antes de ser libres book cover showing hands with strings playing cat's cradle with a butterfly

Anita de la Torre nunca cuestionó su libertad viviendo en la República Dominicana. Pero al cumplir doce años de edad en 1960, la mayoría de sus familiares han emigrado a Estados Unidos, su tío Toni ha desaparecido sin dejar rastro y la policía secreta del gobierno aterroriza a su familia restante dada su presunta oposición a la dictadura de Trujillo.

Utilizando la fuerza y el valor de su familia, Anita debe vencer sus miedos y volar hacia la libertad, dejando atrás todo lo que alguna vez había conocido.

De la renombrada autora Julia Alvarez llega una historia inolvidable sobre la adolescencia, la perseverancia y la lucha de una niña por su libertad.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories (2024) | Discussion Questions

Cemetery of Untold Stories, by Julia Alvarez book cover

Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories–literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.

Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas and soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma’s characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo’s abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

En el Tiempo de las Mariposas (1994) | Discussion Questions

En el tiempo de las mariposas cover showing woman with butterfly

Ellas eran lasa cuatro hermanas Mirabal—símbolos de una esperanza desafiante en un país ensombrecido por la dictadura y la desesperación. Sacrificaron sus vidas, seguras, y confortables, en nombre de la libertad. Ellas eran “las Mariposas,” y en esta novela extraordinaria, Patria, Minerva, Maria Teresa, y Dedé nos cuentan, a través de las décadas, sus propias historias. Desde anécdotas sobre lazos para el pelo y secretos enamoramientos al contrabando de armas y las torturas en la cárcel. Con ellas aprendemos los horrores cotidianos de la vida bajo el dictador dominicano Trujillo.

A través del arte y la magia de la aclamada e imaginativa novelista Julia Alvarez, la dramática y vibrante vida de estas martirizadas mariposas toma forma en una historia cálida, brillante y desgarradora en la que se nos muestra el incalculable coste humano derivado de la oppresión política.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) | Discussion Questions

how the garcia girls lost their accents cover

Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, the four Garcia sisters-Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia-arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind. What they have lost-and what they find-is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that make up this exquisite novel from one of the premiere novelists of our time.

In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) | Discussion Questions

In the time of the Butterflies cover showing drawing of woman and butterfly

On a deserted mountain road in the Dominican Republic in 1960, three young women from a pious Catholic family were assassinated after visiting their husbands who had been jailed as suspected rebel leaders. The Mirabal sisters, thus martyred, became mythical figures in their country, where they are known as Las Mariposas (the butterflies). Three decades later, Julia Alvarez, daughter of the Dominican Republic and author of the acclaimed How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, brings the Mirabal sisters back to life in this extraordinary novel. Each of the sisters speaks in her own voice; beginning as young girls in the 1940s, their stories vary from hair ribbons to gun-running to prison torture. Their story is framed by their surviving sister who tells her own tale of suffering and dedication to the memory of Las Mariposas. This inspired portrait of four women is a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression, and is destined to take its place alongside Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Allende’s The House of the Spirits as one of the great 20th-century Latin American novels.

Más Allá (2020) | Discussion Questions

Mas alla cover showing a face/tree sillhouette

Poco después de jubilarse de la universidad donde enseñaba literatura, Antonia Vega, una escritora latina, pierde a su adorado esposo y su vida parece desmoronarse de repente. Hasta entonces parecía haber encontrado consuelo en la literatura que ama—las palabras de sus autores preferidos dan vueltas en su cabeza como plegarias—, pero la desaparición de su hermana, con su personalidad impredecible y su gran corazón, junto con la aparición de una inmigrante ilegal en el garaje de su casa, devuelven a Antonia a la dura realidad. En estas circunstancias, el mundo requiere más que palabras.

Mas allá es una novela ágil y de prosa depurada. En momentos en los que reinan la confusión y el caos, la protagonista se plantea: ¿Le debemos algo a los que sufren, sean inmigrantes desconocidos o familiares cercanos? ¿Cómo podemos mantener la fe en los demás y en nosotros mismos en una realidad destrozada? Y, sobre todo, ¿cómo honramos a las personas que amamos y hemos perdido?

Quotations:

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.
I’m more in the Faulkner tradition. I’m writing my Spanish in English. Florid, flowing, expansive, rococo sounds, the sonority of Spanish closer to the Latin roots than the English, which has been also infused with Anglo Saxon, Germanic words. Really, it’s part of my English. It’s how I write English.
It’s UPS
with two parcels! …
a handsome lad, guesses it’s my birthday
and asks how old I am. He acts surprised
he’s a decade younger. We linger at the door
one of us is not immortal anymore.
The typical Bildungsroman, the novel of growing up, first of all traditionally involves a single character reaching a kind of epiphany or self-realization, and it has a forward trajectory, which is the classic structure of the novel. But I wanted to structure [How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents] so that the reader can experience, not by being told but shown, what it feels like to be an immigrant – you’re always going back, going back to where you came from to measure who you are today. So plot in a novel is not just how you’re going to fit all the pieces together or how you’re going to do the chronology. Plot is more sophisticated than that. It’s a way of structuring the way the reader thinks and feels.
I was looking for books and stories and novels that addressed our history in the Americas. And there weren’t that many for young readers. I saw that they had a lot of books about the Holocaust and about slavery, but not that much about kids growing up in a dictatorship up and down the Americas, which was the phenomenon of the last century in many of our countries. Many Latinos in the Dominican Republic had grandparents or parents who had fled from dictatorships. I wanted our own Anne Frank story. And that was really the story I set in the Dominican Republic in the Trujillo dictatorship.
Writing is hard work, a huge commitment of time, energy, faith, passion, and there’s nothing shameful in the attempt, even if the work doesn’t end up succeeding. I’d rather let someone else do the public culling — I’m exacting enough in private.
every query worthy of their attention,
any questioner taken seriously,
curiosity the only requirement.
I love how they listen, their lined faces opening,
their eyes already elsewhere
(from the poem ‘Why I Am in Love with Librarians‘)

Awards & Recognition:

Pura Belpré and Américas Awards (2004, 2010)
Hispanic Heritage Award (2002)
F. Scott Fitzgerald Award (2009)
National Medal of Arts (2013)

Videos/Interviews

Sources

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