Different countries, different experiences.

Julia Alvarez’s “How the García girls lost their accents” is a short story about a young girl called Carla who lives with her family in America. Before they decided to live in this country Carla was a happy teenager in Spain. She loves her country and didn’t know how to handle with this strange language and habits of the Americans. The second problem is that she hates that her body is changing and if wouldn’t that be enough her classmates are kidding her because of that. On her way back home from school happened something mysterious to Carla.

Carla is the main character in this story. It seems like she is a very dissatisfied girl who didn’t want to accept that she and her family moved to America. She isn’t really changing in this story, I think she is a bit boring and shy. Her mother is a typical mother who wants the best for his child. She is changing her opinion in this story in that way that she accept that just because the school in which she wants Carla to go is a catholic school, it isn’t safer. At the end she accepted Carla to go in a public school.

The short story is told by the perspective of an omniscient narrator. But I think I would have been better if the story was written in the view of the first person because I could have put me better in her position.

The plot is quite chronologically sequenced, because there aren’t much flash-forwards or flashbacks.

The setting doesn’t seem to play a big role in this story, may for the way to school but also there it doesn’t attract attention to me.

The biggest problem for me was to feel about the characters, the main character was not sympathetic to me because her thoughts are mostly negative. All in all I didn’t feel something for the characters or their actions.

Julia Alvarez wanted to attract attention to an important theme in our society: sexual discrimination. I think the basic idea of her is good but the transformation wasn’t really that what I expected from this short story. I also didn’t know what to do with the title of the story because it didn’t rudimentary has anything to do with the plot. I wouldn’t recommend that story for teenagers older than fourteen, for the rest it may be interesting to read about this theme.