How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez (
Wikipedia) is an historical period-set coming of age multicultural literary fiction novel centred around the daughters of a Dominican refugee immigrant family fleeing a 50s dictatorship adjusting from their former wealth and status to a much lower standard of living, as well as encountering cultural differences and having to find their own way between the old world and the new, free courtesy of publisher Workman's Algonquin Books imprint.
This is a fairly major-ish modern Latin American literature work, which I actually own in paperback and read a long time ago and quite liked and highly recommend (and it also has a lengthy
Wikipedia entry discussing the themes and so forth), so I'm really pleased to see it show up as a freebie and hope we get more such in the future from Algonquin as well.
Currently free @
Amazon &
iTunes (neither available to Canadians).
I suspect this is a price-match to an iTunes promotion similar to that which recently appeared in the Canadian store and will probably not appear elsewhere.
And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.
Because getting one of my personal favourites which also happens to be a reasonably important and also excellent and enjoyable work in its particular genre as a freebie to share with you all (well, those of you who have a qualifying US store account or can fake it, at least) is simply awesometastic.
Enjoy!
Description
Celebrated writer Julia Alvarez’s brilliant, buoyant and beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters recounting their adventures growing up in two cultures. Selected as a Notable Book by both the New York Times and the American Library Association, it won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for its multicultural perspective and was chosen by New York librarians as one of twenty-one classics for the twenty-first century. Ms. Alvarez was recently honored with the 2013 National Medal of Arts for her extraordinary storytelling.
In this debut novel, the García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father’s role in an attempt to overthrow a tyrannical dictator is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wild and wondrous and not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways, but the girls try find new lives: by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating to be caught between the old world and the new.
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents sets the sisters free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home—and not at home—in America.