Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Alvarez, Julia - Elizabeth Starcevic (review date August-September 1992)

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Elizabeth Starcevic (review date August-September 1992)

SOURCE: "Talking about Language," in The American Book Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, August-September, 1992, p. 15.

[Starcevic is a critic and professor of Spanish. In the following review, she praises Alvarez's portrayal of the family in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents but faults her for not having "consistently developed voices."]

[In How the García Girls Lost Their Accents], it is the voices of the García girls, the four lovely daughters of Mami and Papi García, who singly and in chorus offer the shifting choral poem that recounts their life as "strangers in a strange land." (Julia Alvarez left the Domincan Republic when she was ten years old. She published Homecoming, her first book of poetry, in 1986.) Privileged children of a privileged Dominican upper-class family, they are forced to leave their idyllic family compound to come and live in New York....

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Fred Muratori (review date Winter 1986)
   2. Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés (review date July 1991)
   3. Donna Rifkind (review date 6 October 1991)
   4. Jason Zappe (review date Winter 1991)
   5. Julia Alvarez with Catherine Wiley (interview date March 1992)
   6. Ilan Stavans (review date 10 April 1992)
   7. Bruce-Novoa (review date Summer 1992)
   8. Elizabeth Starcevic (review date August-September 1992)
   9. Julia Alvarez (essay date February 1993)
   10. Ilan Stavans (review date 7 November 1994)
   11. Dwight Garner (review date Winter 1994)
   12. Roberto González Echevarría (review date 18 December 1994)
   13. Janet Jones Hampton (review date Spring 1995)
   14. Rochelle Ratner (review date 15 April 1995)
   15. Publishers Weekly (review date 24 April 1995)
   16. Ruth Behar (review date May 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Julia Alvarez