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matildazq's profile picture

matildazq 's review for:

4.0

I found this a compelling read. It is hard to argue with its effective structure, distributing the story among the four sisters, and blending the personal with the political. I was also very interested in the subject matter as (shamefully) I know almost nothing about the history of the Dominican Republic.

In that sense, I guess that I am the target audience that Alvarez discusses in her postscript note (i.e., a North American who has the privilege of knowing almost nothing). That said, I do take the point of several whose reviews of this are strongly negative. In general, freely and overtly fictionalizing real people with real histories is tricky and problematic (of course, straightforward histories do their fictionalizing on the down-low, so there isn't a clear-cut distinction). And here, specifically, there's an extra layer of problematic given that Alvaraez is catering to the tastes and knowledge level of the North American audience.

Even as I was reading, I would be pulled up short by the things the author chose to render in Spanish very sporadically, so I think these issues were nibbling at my brain, even when I was enjoying the book. I guess in summary, I enjoyed this as a novel, but that in itself is something of a problem.