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Is the way Alvarez has fictionalized the true stories of the Mirabal sisters a good idea?

I love what she says about this in the Postscript. She wants to reclaim them as women--as human beings who were also revolutionary. Buying purses on the day they are assassinated is a very bold way to cross the bridge between the "male" role of revolutionary and the "female" role as consumer of beauty, each enhancing the other. The women are frivolous as well as courageous, giving them a complexity that stories of heroism often lack. Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One's Own that we don't know the histories of women because no one has written them, and she contests the difference between factual truth and REAL emotional truth that often transcends facts. In my mind, that is what Alvarez accomplishes: crafts a greater truth than any facts of the sisters (which I understand are rather limited) could reveal.