In the time of the butterflies

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Title :

In the time of the butterflies / Julia Alvarez.

Title:

In the time of the butterflies

Author:

Alvarez, Julia

Format:

Books

Physical Description:

336 pages ; 21 cm.

Edition:

First Algonquin paperback edition

ISBN:

9781565129764

Production / Publication Information:

Chapel Hill, N.C. : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010.

General Note:

Includes Reading and discussion guide.

Originally published: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994--T.p. verso.

Summary:

The life and death of three revolutionary sisters in the Dominican Republic, told by a surviving fourth. One by one the Mirabal Sisters, as they were known, join the opposition to the Trujillo dictatorship in the 1950s, suffering imprisonment and torture while their men watch powerless. They are released, then one night their jeep is ambushed. A story based on real events by the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.

Language:

English

Genre:

Historical fiction.

Geographic Term:

Dominican Republic -- History -- 1930-1961 -- Fiction.

Personal Subject:

Mirabal, María Teresa, 1936-1960-Fiction.

Mirabal, Minerva, 1926-1960-Fiction.

Mirabal, Patria, 1924-1960-Fiction.

Subject Term:

Women revolutionaries -- Fiction

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Billerica Public Library	FICTION/ALVAREZ	33934004422656	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library	FIC ALVAREZ (PB)	32120001160231	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Haverhill Public Library	SRL/ALVAREZ J	31479006555501	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Haverhill Public Library	SRL/ALVAREZ J	31479006555519	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lawrence Public Library	FIC ALV	31549004667803	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lawrence Public Library	FIC ALV	31549004667811	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lawrence Public Library	FIC ALV	31549004667829	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Merrimac Public Library	F ALV	32125001377180	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library	TEEN ALVAREZ	31478010039627	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library	F ALVAREZ	31478010164797	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Rockport Public Library	FIC ALVAREZ	32129002407723	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Rockport Public Library	YA FIC ALVAREZ	32129002408929	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is "beautiful, heartbreaking and alive ... a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo." (Concepción de León, New York Times )

Alvarez's new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is coming April 2, 2024. Pre-order now!

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas--the Butterflies.

In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression.

"Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."--Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review

"This Julia Alvarez classic is a must-read for anyone of Latinx descent." --Popsugar.com

"A gorgeous and sensitive novel . . . A compelling story of courage, patriotism and familial devotion." -- People

"Shimmering . . . Valuable and necessary." -- Los Angeles Times

"A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time." -- St. Petersburg Times

"Alvarez does a remarkable job illustrating the ruinous effect the 30-year dictatorship had on the Dominican Republic and the very real human cost it entailed."--Cosmopolitan.com

Summary

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas--"The Butterflies."

In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

During the last days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, three young women, members of a conservative, pious Catholic family, who had become committed to the revolutionary overthrow of the regime, were ambushed and assassinated as they drove back from visiting their jailed husbands. Thus martyred, the Mirabal sisters have become mythical figures in their country, where they are known as las mariposas (the butterflies), from their underground code names. Herself a native of the Dominican Republic, Alvarez ( How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents ) has fictionalized their story in a narrative that starts slowly but builds to a gripping intensity. Each of the girls--Patria, Minerva and Maria Terese (Mate) Mirabal--speaks in her own voice, beginning in their girlhood in the 1940s; their surviving sister, Dede, frames the narrative with her own tale of suffering and dedication to their memory. To differentiate their personalities and the ways they came to acquire revolutionary fervor, Alvarez takes the risk of describing their early lives in leisurely detail, somewhat slowing the narrative momentum. In particular, the giddy, childish diary entries of Mate, the youngest, may seem irritatingly mundane at first, but in time Mate's heroism becomes the most moving of all, as the sisters endure the arrests of their husbands, their own imprisonment and the inexorable progress of Trujillo's revenge. Alvarez captures the terrorized atmosphere of a police state, in which people live under the sword of terrible fear and atrocities cannot be acknowledged. As the sisters' energetic fervor turns to anguish, Alvarez conveys their courage and their desperation, and the full import of their tragedy. 40,000 first printing; $40,000 ad/promo; reprint rights to NAL; 20-city author tour. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Review

Brimming with warmth and vitality, this new novel by the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) is a paean to the power of female courage. The butterflies are four smart and lovely Dominican sisters growing up during Trujillo's despotic regime. While her parents try desperately to cling to their imagined island of security in a swelling sea of fear and intimidation, Minerva Mirabal -- the sharpest and boldest of the daughters, born with a fierce will to fight injustice -- jumps headfirst into the revolutionary tide. Her sisters come upon their courage more gradually, through a passionate, protective love of family or through the sheer impossibility of closing their eyes to the horrors around them. Together, their bravery and determination meld into a seemingly insurmountable force, making Trujillo, for all his power, appear a puny adversary. Alvarez writes beautifully, whether creating the ten-year-old Maria Teresa's charming diary entries or describing Minerva's trip home after her first unsettling confrontation with Trujillo: ""As the road darkened, the beams of our headlights filled with hundreds of blinded moths. Where they hit the windshield, they left blurry marks, until it seemed like I was looking at the world through a curtain of tears."" If the Mirabal sisters are iron-winged butterflies, their men -- father and husbands -- often resemble those blinded moths, feeble and fallible. Still, the women view them with kind, forgiving eyes, and though there's no question of which sex is being celebrated here, a sweet and accepting spirit toward frailty, if not human cruelty, prevails. This is not Garcia Márquez or Allende territory (no green hair or floating bodies); Alvarez's voice is her own, grounded in realism yet alive with the magic of everyday human beings who summon extraordinary courage and determination to fight for their beliefs. As mesmerizing as the Mirabal sisters themselves. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Alvarez follows her charming first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), with a broader, deeper, and even more affecting second one. It's a true story drawn from the history of her native Dominican Republic, about the Mirabel sisters, who, along with their husbands, were instrumental in the formation of an underground resistance movement against the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. What Alvarez achievesso effortlessly and splendidly, with controlled emotion and resonant detailis a novel with a beautifully balanced sense of domestic as well as political drama. She portrays the sisters as they grow from girls into women and follows their paths from school, boys, marriage, and children to even greaterlife-and-deathconcerns. Her novel is a statement about politics and history told in very human terms and, as importantly, told not with outrage, but with self-possession. Certain to be a hit. (Reviewed July 1994)1565120388Brad Hooper

Library Journal Review

Alvarez's award-winning first novel (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, LJ 5/1/91) is more than matched by her second. Butterflies is based on the lives of the four Mirabel sisters (code name: "Mariposas," that is, butterflies), three of whom were martyred in 1960 during the liberation of the Dominican Republic from the dictator Trujillo. Through the surviving sister, Dede, as well as memories of Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa, we discover the compelling forces behind each sister's role in the struggle for freedom. As Alvarez says "A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart." Though murder, torture, and imprisonment are ever-present, she wisely choses to focus on the personal lives of these young wives and mothers, full of love, beauty, and, especially, hope. Highly recommended for its luminescence and relevance.-Rebecca S. Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.