March - How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

For March, we read a book about Dominican Republicans who immigrated to the United States in the 1960's. Julia Alvarez chose to write How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents in reverse chronological order and we found that we actually spent more time in the DR than the US which gave us a foundation for why they assimilated the way they did. While this people liked the book, they largely found it forgettable and more than a little confusing as we tried to keep track of whose point of view we were reading.

To get us talking about the book (and as a way to make sure we kept on track!), we played a Jeopardy-like game this month which was a lot of fun, and which we'll probably tweak and use again for other books. Under headings that included "What A Character" and "That's Novel," we talked about the different characters in the book, the way the novel was written,  immigration, and some words associated with the novel.

While this might not have been the most popular book we ever read, we did find a lot to discuss and I think it did make a good choice for a book club discussion, particularly when we were able to include some information about Alvarez and her own history which is very similar to the book.