La Bloga: Guest Review: Julia Alvarez. Saving the World.

“I have a confession to make: I have an unhealthy obsession with Yolanda Garcia.

Yo isn’t even a real person. She’s the character that stands in for Dominican-American super-writer Julia Alvarez in her books How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Yo! At least, it seems that way: Yo is the writer, the one who ends up teaching at a small New England college and marrying a nice, do-gooder white guy. (Alvarez teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont, and is married to a white doctor.) Yo! in particular was a book that I couldn’t let go of: each chapter is spoken by one of an army of distinct characters explaining this fragile, fiery talent, Yolanda Garcia. I imagined I’d teach the book during my stint in Teach for America; fate conspired to give me beginning ESL students, so I went to Plan B and gave them small bits of The House on Mango Street, which is hardly a consolation prize. But Yo! remains one of my favorite books of all time, and Miss Garcia one of my favorite characters.”

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