Ready Reference Treatise: How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

The story is narrated from the reverse chronological order. It has been narrated from shifting perspectives.

The text of the story makes it a “Formation Novel” or “The Bildungsroman”, which happens to be a genre of the novel that concentrates on the psychological and moral development of the protagonist from the protagonist’s youth to adulthood. Change happens to be very important in this genre of novels. There are a number of formal, topical, and thematic features which establish the book as “Formation Novel.”

Nowadays, the term coming-of-age novel is used, but it happens to be less technical, though with wider use.

The story covers more than thirty years in the lives of four sisters. In the opening of the novel there is the description of their adult lives in the United States. The novel ends with the description of their childhood in the Dominican Republic. Their father had opposed Rafael Leonida Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and consequently they were forced to leave their own country.