One of the great things about Before We Were Free is that it is based on a personal account of the author, who was born in the US, and then was taken to live in the Dominican Republic, before fleeing from there at the age of ten since her father participated in “a failed plot to overthrow a dictator”. The book is short and easy to read, even though it does lose some of its compelling force in the middle and no longer provides any fresh insights by the end. Alvarez’s book strikes a delicate balance between the joys and sorrows of late childhood, including first love and early teenage insecurities, and the external tragedy and the experience of the world falling apart because of random acts of violence. Anita de la Torre may be only twelve but she already knows what it is like to have her family members suddenly disappear and a secret police raiding her home. Julia Alvarez’s Before We Were Free is a moving coming-of-age account of a young girl who grows up in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship in the late 1950s.
Here is my first review of February, and I am continuing with a book by Julia Alvarez for my Latin America Reading Challenge. January has been a month of (intense) new beginnings for me (including yoga), and I finally have more time to move forward with my blog posts. First, I would like to say to my followers that the reason I have not been so active on my blog recently is because I have taken a number of projects simultaneously over the past month, including taken more work assignments, started learning Japanese officially, started writing two fiction books (one of which will be a historical fiction/murder mystery set in France), and also started learning the piano.
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