Assignment One

  After reading the first few pages of How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, I've noticed that the writing isn't what I'm used to reading. It's more of a unique writing style compared to other books. The author, Julia Alvarez, starts off the story with making the reader think or guess. She doesn't introduce the characters with much background, instead she just jumps into the story. The family tree provides relations between characters, but that's the only thing providing information of background. The tree is interesting. It shows that the de la Torre family is much larger than the Garcia family, but that might not be true due to the "33 other known Garcias". Because there is a chunk of family that is unknown, it sparks the question of why they are, which may be revealed later in the story. "The hair-and-nails cousins" seems to be categorizing or creating stereotypes of characters, which may create tension or differences. The first few pages of this story have encouraged me to keep reading and also rose questions.