In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
Three sisters who fought Trujillo. One survived to remember.
For you if
you want to understand political courage through the women who paid for it with their lives
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The Mirabal sisters — Patria, Dedé, Minerva, and María Teresa — were real women who organized underground resistance to Trujillo's dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Three were assassinated in 1960; Dedé survived to tell the story for the next forty years. Alvarez, a Dominican American writer, builds the novel in alternating voices, giving each sister her own interior life and her own reason for doing what she did. This is not a martyrdom story. It is a novel about four people who looked at what their country needed and decided to become it, knowing the cost. The Mirabal sisters are now a national symbol — the novel gives them back their individual selves.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Dominican Republic • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Dominican author
- Topics
- trujillo regime
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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