In The Time Of The Butterflies Analysis

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For my Writing I class, I was required to choose between two books and write a review about it. Not much of reader, I was reluctant in reading any of the books; it felt like a burden. Having a prior knowledge of one of the texts, I had no desire to read the other novel. I could’ve chose to read and write about the novel I knew about, but I’m glad I chose to go beyond my comfort zone to read In the Time of the Butterflies. Believing the novel is more a biography, I had little expectation. As soon as I read the part that the father had three daughters and really wanted a son, I was captivated to continue reading especially considering how much I related to that story. This book went further and I couldn’t stop reading that, I finished the 321 page novel in three days breaking my own record. …show more content…

By fictionalizing the book and including small matters such as getting period, writing on diaries, and questioning god, Alvarez simultaneously made the sisters both heroic and human. This choice of the author to write the novel this way helped me relate to the story and inspired me at the same time. Set in the mid-1900s Dominican Republic, under the reign of Dictator Rafael Trujillo, Julia Alvarez’s novel takes us on a journey of the four women who defied the odds of society and brought down Trujillo’s regime. Alvarez, herself, a child of a survivor of the regime, believed it is these heroes who awakened the world about the horrible treatment of Dominicans under Trujillo. I couldn’t agree more to Alvarez’s intention to write the novel to give a platform to hear the voices of the heroes of the Dominican Republic. Alvarez cleverly does this by separating each chapter by each of the sister’s name, so that no one sister is telling the story of the

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