A 12-year-old girl bears witness to the Dominican Revolution of 1961 in a powerful first-person narrative. The story opens as Anita's cousins (the Garcia girls of Alvarez's 1991 adult debut, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents ), hurriedly pack to leave the country. This signals the end of childhood innocence for Anita. In short succession, her family finds the secret police parked in their driveway; the American consul moves in next door; and her older sister Lucinda is packed off to join her cousins in New York after she attracts the unwelcome attention of El Jefe Trujillo, the country's dictator. Anita's family, it seems, is intimately involved with the political resistance to Trujillo, and she, perforce, is drawn into the emotional maelstrom. The present-tense narrative lends the story a gripping immediacy, as Anita moves from the healthy, self-absorbed naivete of early adolescence to a prematurely aged understanding of the world's brutality. Her entree into puberty goes hand in hand with her entree into this adult world of terror: "I don't want to be a senorita now that I know what El Jefe does to senoritas ." According to an author's note, Alvarez ( How Tia Lola Came to Visit Stay , 2001, etc.) drew upon the experiences of family members who stayed behind in the Dominican Republic during this period of political upheaval, crafting a story that, in its matter-of-fact detailing of the increasingly surreal world surrounding Anita, feels almost realer than life. The power of the narrative is weakened somewhat by the insertion of Anita's diary entries as she and her mother take shelter in the Italian Embassy after her father's arrest. The first-person, present-tense construction of the diary entries are not different enough from the main narrative to make them come alive as such; instead, the artifice draws attention to itself, creating a distraction. This is a minor quibble with a story that imagines so clearly for American readers the travails of all-too-many Latin nations then and now. (Fiction. 10-14)

What is it like for a 12-year-old girl living under a ruthless dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960? Alvarez draws on her own cousins' and friends' experiences to tell the political story through the eyes of Anita, whose father is involved in a plot to assassinate the dictator and bring democracy to the island. This doesn't have the passionate lyricism of Alvarez's great adult novels. The pace, at least for the first half of the book, is very slow, perhaps because the first-person, present-tense narrative stays true to Anita's bewildered viewpoint and is weighed down with daily detail and explanation of the political issues (I feel just awful that my father has to kill someone for us to be free). Yet it is Anita's innocence, her focus on the ordinary, that young readers will recognize. She's busy with school, friends, getting her period, falling in love, even as the secrets and spies come closer and, finally, the terror destroys her home. Her father is arrested; she and her mother are in hiding. There's no sensationalism, but Anita knows the horrific facts of how prisoners are tortured and killed. Trying to block out the truth, she loses her voice, even forgets the words for things, until she starts to write in a secret diary. Readers interested in the history will grab this. Like Lyll Becerra de Jenkins' The Honorable Prison (1988), about a young girl whose father resists a Latin American dictatorship, and Beverley Naidoo's The Other Side of Truth (Booklist' s 2001 Top of the List winner for youth fiction), Alvarez's story will also spark intense discussion about politics and family.

In her first YA novel, Alvarez (<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">How the García Girls Lost Their Accents) proves as gifted at writing for adolescents as she is for adults. Here she brings her warmth, sensitivity and eye for detail to a volatile setting—the Dominican Republic of her childhood, during the 1960–1961 attempt to overthrow Trujillo's dictatorship. The story opens as 12-year-old narrator Anita watches her cousins, the García girls, abruptly leave for the U.S. with their parents; Anita's own immediate family are now the only ones occupying the extended family's compound. Alvarez relays the terrors of the Trujillo regime in a muted but unmistakable tone; for a while, Anita's parents protect her (and, by extension, readers), both from the ruler's criminal and even murderous ways and also from knowledge of their involvement in the planned coup d'état. The perspective remains securely Anita's, and Alvarez's pitch-perfect narration will immerse readers in Anita's world. Her crush on the American boy next door is at first as important as knowing that the maid is almost certainly working for the secret police and spying on them; later, as Anita understands the implications of the adult remarks she overhears, her voice becomes anxious and the tension mounts. When the revolution fails, Anita's father and uncle are immediately arrested, and she and her mother go underground, living in secret in their friends' bedroom closet—a sequence the author renders with palpable suspense. Alvarez conveys the hopeful ending with as much passion as suffuses the tragedies that precede it. A stirring work of art. Ages 12-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Aug.)

This book bridges Alvarez's two adult novels set during the final days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. In the fall of 1960, Anita, almost twelve, tries to gain some control over frightening events by writing in her diary. Her final months in the country are a poignant blend of typical adolescent concerns and the terrible realities of life under a violent dictatorship. This is a compelling acount of a girl growing up too quickly while coming to terms with the cost of freedom.

Gr 6-10-By the morning of her 12th birthday, in December, 1960, Anita de la Torre's comfortable childhood in her home in the Dominican Republic is a thing of the past. The political situation for opponents of the dictator Rafael Trujillo has become so dangerous that nearly all of her relatives have emigrated to the U.S., leaving only her uncle, T'o Toni, somewhere in hiding, and her parents, still determined to carry on the resistance. Over the next year, the girl becomes increasingly aware of the nature of the political situation and her family's activities. Once her father's cotorrita, or talkative parrot, she grows increasingly silent. When the dictator is assassinated, her father and uncle are arrested, her older brother is sheltered in the Italian Embassy, and Anita and her mother must go into hiding as well. Diary entries written by the child while in hiding will remind readers of Anne Frank's story. They will find Anita's interest in boys and her concerns about her appearance, even when she and her mother can see no one, entirely believable. Readers will be convinced by the voice of this Spanish-speaking teenager who tells her story entirely in the present tense. Like Anita's brother Mund'n, readers will bite their nails as the story moves to its inexorable conclusion.-Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.