How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents By Julia Alvarez

Even within fiction, people tend to invent the worlds they individually live in. Mothers live in worlds in which their children can do no wrong, politicians live in worlds where only the issues outlined in their platforms exist, students live in worlds built by essays. In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen, and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Yolanda, Mona, and Baby Kochamma each seem to live in their own personal realities, unaffected by the real world. The women in these novels effectively invent the world around them through stories, lies, or manipulations. First, Yolanda in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is a poet by trade, a story teller. The basis of the novel is the idea that people are made of the stories others tell about them as much as anything else. This idea is evident within just the first few chapters of the novel, with Yolanda’s mother telling stories about childhood. The mother explains that Yo had always been a poet. Her parents knew early on when they accidentally left her on a bus and she “had a circle of people around her listening to her reciting a poem” that she would grow up to be a storyteller (49). The stories her mother tells about her …show more content…
She manipulates Estha and Rahel by telling them that she knew “it wasn’t an accident” that Sophie drowned, even though both the children knew it was, and immediately assures the twins that she “can’t tell a lie” (300). She convinces the two of them to implicate a nearly dead Velutha in kidnapping them, and subsequently killing Sophie, or the both of them plus their mother would end up in prison. After the whole ordeal, at least in the eyes of the law, Velutha was a bad man and the Ipe family were merely victims of the awful actions taken by the undesirables and the