SOURCE: "No Place Like Home," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 8, Nos. 10-11, July, 1991, p. 39.

In the following review, Milanés calls How the García Girls Lost Their Accents a portrait of "its protagonists' precarious coming of age."

As so many immigrants and exiles know, you can never go back home. It's never the same—or rather we are not the same. In Julia Alvarez' novel the sisters Carla, Sandra, Yolanda and Sofía lose their island accents, life and ways, but How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is not simply about adjustment and acculturation. It is about its protagonists' precarious coming of age as Latinas in the United States and gringas in Santo Domingo.

On the first anniversary of the family's life in the US, Carla makes a clearly unrealizable wish:

What do you wish for on the first celebration of the day you...