cia girls try to fit into the American concept of adolescence. They iron their hair and buy bell-bottom pants with fringe. What is distinctive about Alvarez's narrative is that she manages to convey not only the Garcia's girls' longing to fit in, but also their sense of unrecoverable loss as the girls remain conscious of the advantages of their Dominican selves. Through her use of language, Alvarez conveys the ambivalence that many Hispanic Americans feel as they adapt to the idiosyncrasies of Anglo-Saxon America. While this book is a novel, each of its sections can be read as independent unit. The opening chapters begin in 1988, but the succeeding chapters go back to 1956. As if the Garcia girls were traveling back in time to their Hispanic origins, the book tells their story in reverse order, as the girls navigate from maturity to adolescence. The reader observes the slow deconstruction of the Garcia girls' adult personalities as they reflect upon their past and their Catholic education and upbringing. The title of this novel refers to the fact that language can serve as a metaphor, a symbol, for cultural abandonment. Alvarez, consequently, uses language to dramatize the transition from an ancestral vehicle of communication to an active, convenient one.While Morrison and Alvarez both deal with characters who are not readily included in mainstream American culture-protagonists from both novels have to deal with prejudice and the vagaries of the English language-the mood, the feel, of these novels is very different. The feel of Alavarez' novel is lighter than that of Morrison's. The Garcia family is buffeted, first by the political circumstances that exile them from Santa Domingo, and then by their experiences in the US, but the Garcia girls are essentially whole. To a certain extent, they rebel against their parents, but this is not a dysfunctional family. For example, in "Daughter of Invention," what could arguably be called the best ...
