Wendy Perkins, an Associate Professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland, has published articles on several twentieth-century authors. In this essay she argues that Alvarez's effective structuring of the stories in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents reinforces the novel's focus on the problems inherent in the immigrant experience.

Many critics have praised Julia Alvarez's sensitive and adept portrait of a family's struggle with assimilation in How the Garda Girls Lost Their Accents. Donna Rifkind, in the New York Times Book Review, wrote that Alvarez "beautifully captured the threshold experiences of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory and the future remains an anxious dream." Jason Zappe noted in the American Review that "Alvarez speaks for many families and brings to light the challenges faced by many immigrants. She shows how the tensions of successes and failures don't have...