Julia Alvarez Books In Order

Tia Lola Stories Books In Publication Order

  1. How Tia Lola Came to(Visit) Stay (2001)
  2. How Tia Lola Learned to Teach (2010)
  3. How Tia Lola Saved the Summer (2011)
  4. How Tia Lola Ended Up Starting Over (2011)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991)
  2. In the Time of the Butterflies (1994)
  3. Yo! (1997)
  4. In the Name of Salome (2000)
  5. The Secret Footprints (2000)
  6. Before We Were Free (2002)
  7. Finding Miracles (2004)
  8. Saving the World (2006)
  9. Return to Sender (2009)
  10. Afterlife (2020)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. Homecoming (1984)
  2. The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004)
  3. Resistencia (2020)

Chapbooks In Publication Order

  1. A Cafecito Story (2001)

Picture Books In Publication Order

  1. A Gift of Gracias (2005)
  2. Where Do They Go? (2016)
  3. Already a Butterfly (2020)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Something to Declare (1998)
  2. Once Upon a Quinceanera (2007)
  3. A Wedding in Haiti (2012)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Future Dictionary of America (2004)

Tia Lola Stories Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

ChapBook Covers

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Julia Alvarez Books Overview

How Tia Lola Came to(Visit) Stay

A delightfully entertaining story of family and culture from acclaimed author Julia Alvarez. Moving to Vermont after his parents split, Miguel has plenty to worry about! T a Lola, his quirky, carism tica, and maybe magical aunt makes his life even more unpredictable when she arrives from the Dominican Republic to help out his Mami. Like her stories for adults, Julia Alvarez’s first middle grade book sparkles with magic as it illuminates a child s experiences living in two cultures.

How Tia Lola Learned to Teach

Tia Lola has been invited to teach Spanish at her niece and nephew’s elementary school. But Miguel wants nothing to do with the arrangement. He hasn’t had an easy time adjusting to his new school in Vermont and doesn’t like living so far away from Papi, who has a new girlfriend and an announcement to make. On the other hand, Miguel’s little sister, Juanita, can’t wait to introduce her colorfully dressed aunt with her migrating beauty mark to all her friends at school-that is, if she can stop getting distracted long enough to remember to do so. Before long, Tia Lola is organizing a Spanish treasure hunt and a Carnaval fiesta at school. Will Miguel be willing to join the fun? Will Juanita get her head out of the clouds and lead her classmates to victory in the treasure hunt?
Told with abundant humor and heart, Julia Alvarez’s new Tia Lola story is the long-awaited sequel to the beloved How Tia Lola Came to Visit Stay.

From the Hardcover edition.

How Tia Lola Saved the Summer

Miguel Guzman isn’t exactly looking forward to the summer now that his mother has agreed to let the Sword family a father, his three daughters, and their dog live with them while they decide whether or not to move to Vermont. Little does Miguel know his aunt has something up her sleeve that just may make this the best summer ever. With her usual flair for creativity and fun, T a Lola decides to start a summer camp for Miguel, his little sister, and the three Sword girls, complete with magical swords, nighttime treasure hunts, campfires, barbecues, and an end of summer surprise!The warm and funny third book in the T a Lola Stories is sure to delight young readers and leave them looking forward to their own summer fun!

How Tia Lola Ended Up Starting Over

Welcome to Tia Lola’s bed and breakfast! With the help of her niece and nephew and the three Sword Sisters, T a Lola is opening the doors of Colonel Charlebois’ grand old Vermont house to visitors from all over. But T a Lola and the children soon realize that running a B & B isn’t as easy they had initially thought especially when it appears that someone is out to sabotage them! Will T a Lola and the kids discover who’s behind the plot to make their B & B fail? And will T a Lola’s family and friends be able to plan her a surprise birthday party in her own B & B without her finding out?The last book in the T a Lola Stories

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

The Garc as Dr. Carlos Papi, his wife Laura Mami, and their four daughters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sof a belong to the uppermost echelon of Spanish Caribbean society, descended from the conquistadores. Their family compound adjoins the palacio of the dictator’s daughter. So when Dr. Garc a s part in a coup attempt is discovered, the family must flee. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. Papi has to find new patients in the Bronx. Mami, far from the compound and the family retainers, must find herself. Meanwhile, the girls try to lose themselves by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating being caught between the old world and the new, trying to live up to their father s version of honor while accommodating the expectations of their American boyfriends. Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez s brilliant and buoyant first novel sets the Garc a girls free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home and not at home in America.

In the Time of the Butterflies

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150 foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas The Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters Minerva, Patria, Mar a Teresa, and the survivor, Ded speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.

Yo!

At last! A zesty, exuberant follow up to the wildly popular How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, full of Julia Alvarez’s keen observations and tender affection for her characters. The Garcia Girls are back, most notably Yolanda, or Yo, who has grown up to be a writer. In the process, she has managed to get kicked out of college, break more than a few hearts, have her own heart broken many times, return for extended visits to the Dominican Republic her family fled when she was a child, and marry three times. She has also infuriated her entire family by publishing the intimate details of their lives as fiction. The injured parties her mother, her sisters, the Dominican cousins, the maid’s daughter, her teachers, her lover, want to tell their side of the story, and Yo! hands the microphone to them. Cousin Lucinda shrugs off Yo’s characterization of her as a Latin American Barbie with a size three soul, saying, Looking at her in her late 30s, knocking around the world without a husband, house, or children, I think you are the haunted one who ended up living your life mostly on paper. This brilliant novel is a full and true exploration of a woman’s soul, a meditation on the writing life, and a lyrical account of the immigrant’s search for identity and a place in the world. Yo!’s bright colors, zesty dialogue, warm feeling, and genuine insight could only come from the palette of Julia Alvarez.

In the Name of Salome

In her most ambitious work since In the Time of Butterflies, Julia Alvarez tells the story of a woman whose poetry inspired one Caribbean revolution and of her daughter whose dedication to teaching strengthened another. Camila Henriquez Urena is about to retire from her longtime job teaching Spanish at Vassar College. Only now as she sorts through family papers does she begin to know the woman behind the legend of her mother, the revered Salome Urena, who died when Camila was three. In stark contrast to Salome, who became the Dominican Republic’s national poet at the age of seventeen, Camila has spent most of her life trying not to offend anybody. Her mother dedicated her life to educating young women to give them voice in their turbulent new nation; Camila has spent her life quietly and anonymously teaching the Spanish pluperfect to upper class American girls with no notion of revolution, no knowledge of Salome Urena. Now, in 1960, Camila must choose a final destination for herself. Where will she spend the rest of her days? News of the revolution in Cuba mirrors her own internal upheaval. In the process of deciding her future, Camila uncovers the truth of her mother’s tragic personal life and, finally, finds a place for her own passion and commitment. Julia Alvarez has won a large and devoted audience by brilliantly illuminating the history of modern Caribbean America through the personal stories of its people. As a Latina, as a poet and novelist, and as a university professor, Julia Alvarez brings her own experience to this exquisite story.

The Secret Footprints

The Dominican legend of the ciguapas, creatures who lived in underwater caves and whose feet were on backward so that humans couldn’t follow their footprints, is reinvented by renowned author Julia Alvarez. Although the ciguapas fear humans, Guapa, a bold and brave ciguapa, can’t help but be curious especially about a boy she sees on the nights when she goes on the land to hunt for food. When she gets too close to his family and is discovered, she learns that some humans are kind. Even though she escapes unharmed and promises never to get too close to a human again, Guapa still sneaks over to the boy’s house some evenings, where she finds a warm pastelito in the pocket of his jacket on the clothesline. From the Hardcover Library Binding edition.

Before We Were Free

Anita de la Torre never questioned her freedom living in the Dominican Republic. But by her 12th birthday in 1960, most of her relatives have emigrated to the United States, her T o Toni has disappeared without a trace, and the government’s secret police terrorize her remaining family because of their suspected opposition of el Trujillo s dictatorship. Using the strength and courage of her family, Anita must overcome her fears and fly to freedom, leaving all that she once knew behind. From renowned author Julia Alvarez comes an unforgettable story about adolescence, perseverance, and one girl s struggle to be free. From the Hardcover edition.

Finding Miracles

MILLY KAUFMAN IS an ordinary American teenager living in Vermont until she meets Pablo, a new student at her high school. His exotic accent, strange fashion sense, and intense interest in Milly force her to confront her identity as an adopted child from Pablo’s native country. As their relationship grows, Milly decides to undertake a courageous journey to her homeland and along the way discovers the story of her birth is intertwined with the story of a country recovering from a brutal history. Beautifully written by reknowned author Julia Alvarez, Finding Miracles examines the emotional complexity of familial relationships and the miracles of everyday life. From the Hardcover edition.

Saving the World

Latina novelist Alma Huebner is suffering from writer’s block and is years past the completion date for yet another of her bestselling family sagas. Her husband, Richard, works for a humanitarian organization dedicated to the health and prosperity of developing countries and wants her help on an extended AIDS assignment in the Dominican Republic. But Alma begs off joining him: the publisher is breathing down her neck. She promises to work hard and follow him a bit later.

The truth is that Alma is seriously sidetracked by a story she has stumbled across. It’s the story of a much earlier medical do gooder, Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis, who in 1803 undertook to vaccinate the populations of Spain’s American colonies against smallpox. To do this, he required live ‘carriers’ of the vaccine.

Of greater interest to Alma is Isabel Sendales y G mez, director of La Casa de Exp sitos, who was asked to select twenty two orphan boys to be the vaccine carriers. She agreed with the stipulation that she would accompany the boys on the proposed two year voyage. Her strength and courage inspire Alma, who finds herself becoming obsessed with the details of Isabel’s adventures.

This resplendent novel within a novel spins the disparate tales of two remarkable women, both of whom are swept along by machismo. In depicting their confrontation of the great scourges of their respective eras, Alvarez exposes the conflict between altruism and ambition.

Return to Sender

After Tyler’s father is injured in a tractor accident, his family is forced to hire migrant Mexican workers to help save their Vermont farm from foreclosure. Tyler isn t sure what to make of these workers. Are they undocumented? And what about the three daughters, particularly Mari, the oldest, who is proud of her Mexican heritage but also increasingly connected her American life. Her family lives in constant fear of being discovered by the authorities and sent back to the poverty they left behind in Mexico. Can Tyler and Mari find a way to be friends despite their differences?In a novel full of hope, but no easy answers, Julia Alvarez weaves a beautiful and timely story that will stay with readers long after they finish it. From the Hardcover edition.

Homecoming

A revised and expanded edition of the debut poetry collection by the author of How the Garci a7a Girls Lost Their Accents presents a lyrical, intimate reflection on the poet’s own life, family, immigrant heritage, and artistic world.

The Woman I Kept to Myself

The works of award winning poet and novelist Julia Alvarez are rich with the language and influences of two cultures: the Dominican Republic of her childhood and the America of her youth and adulthood. They have shaped her writing just as they have shaped her life.

Since her first celebrated novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, she has been articulating the passions and opinions of sisters and aunts, mothers and daughters, hero*ines and martyrs. In The Woman I Kept to Myself, seventy five poems that weave together the narrative of a woman’s inner life, it is Julia Alvarez’s own clear voice that sings out in every line. These are not poems of a woman discovering herself Alvarez might say that’s what her twenties were for but of a woman returning to herself. Now, in the middle of her life, she looks back as a way of understanding and celebrating the woman she has become. And she hides nothing: from her early marriages to her late in life love, from the politics that informed her to the prejudice that haunts her still. Her fears, her accomplishments, and the ready humor that permeates even her darkest thoughts are all proffered to the reader.

Perhaps the truest words to describe this remarkable collection are the two that give the last section its title: keeping watch. We are pulled into the intimate circle of a woman who keeps us company by sharing the stories and insights that we often keep to ourselves.

A Cafecito Story

A Cafecito Story is a story of love, coffee, birds and hope. It is a beautifully written eco fable by best selling author Julia Alvarez. Based on her and her husband’s experiences trying to reclaim a small coffee farm in her native Dominican Republic, A Cafecito Story shows how the return to the traditional methods of shade grown coffee can rehabilitate and rejuvenate the landscape and human culture, while at the same time preserving vital winter habitat for threatened songbirds. Not a political or environmental polemic, A Cafecito Story is instead a poetic, modern fable about human beings at their best. The challenge of producing coffee is a remarkable test of our ability to live more sustainably, caring for the land, growers, and consumers in an enlightened and just way. Written with Julia Alvarez’s deft touch, this is a story that stimulates while it comforts, waking the mind and warming the soul like the first cup of morning coffee. Indeed, this story is best read with a strong cup of organic, shade grown, fresh brewed coffee.

A Gift of Gracias

After their olive crop fails, Maria fears that her family will have to abandon their farm on the new island colony. Then, one night she dreams of a mysterious and beautiful lady shrouded by trees with branches hung with hundreds of little suns. They are oranges like the ones Maria’s parents once ate in their homeland, Valencia, Spain. That very day, Maria and her family plant the seeds that soon yield a magnificent orange grove and save the farm. But who was the mysterious lady who appeared in her dream and will Maria ever find her again to say gracias?

Something to Declare

In her first book of nonfiction, Julia Alvarez takes us behind the scenes and shares the lessons she’s learned on her way to becoming an internationally acclaimed novelist. In 1960, when Alvarez was ten years old, her family fled the Dominican Republic. Her father participated in a failed coup attempt against the dictator Rafael Trujillo, and exile to the United States was the only way to save his life. The family settled in New York City, where Dr. Alvarez set up a medical practice in the Bronx while his wife and four daughters set about the business of assimilation a lifelong struggle. Loss of her native land, language, culture, and extended family formed the thematic basis for two of Julia Alvarez’s three best selling novels HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and its sequel, YO! Her father’s revolutionary ties inspired IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES, her historical novel about one of Trujillo’s most infamous atrocities. Something to Declare offers an extraordinary collection of essays that deal with the two big issues of Alvarez’s life growing up with one foot in each culture and writing. The twelve essays that make up ‘Customs,’ the first of two parts, examine the specific effects of exile on this writer. The essays are personal how her maternal grandfather passed along his love of the arts, how the nuclear family in exile snuggled down every year to watch the Miss America contest from the parental bed, how Julia feared her family might disown her upon publication of her first novel. In the second half, ‘Declarations,’ are twelve essays about writing that range from confession of Alvarez’s means of supporting her writing habit to the gritty details of her actual process. Every one of these essays is warm, open, honest, and generous. Something to Declare will appeal not only to her many fans, but to students of writing at all levels.

Once Upon a Quinceanera

The bestselling author of How the Garc a Girls Lost Their Accents explores the phenomenon of the Latina sweet fifteen celebration The quincea era, the fifteenth birthday celebration for a Latina girl, is quickly becoming an American event. This legendary party is a sight to behold: lavish ball gowns, extravagant catered meals, DJs, limousines, and multi tiered cakes. The must haves for a quince are becoming as numerous and costly as a prom or wedding. And yet, this elaborate ritual also hearkens back to traditions from native countries and communities, offering young Latinas a chance to connect with their heritage. In Once Upon a Quincea era, Julia Alvarez explores this celebration that brings a Latina girl into womanhood. She attends the quince of a young woman named Monica who lives in Queens, and witnesses the commotion, confusion, and potential for disaster that comes with planning this important event. Alvarez also weaves in interviews with other quince girls, her own memories of coming of age as an immigrant, and the history of the custom itself how it originated and what has changed as Latinas become accustomed to a supersize American culture. Once Upon a Quincea era is an enlightening, accessible, and entertaining portrait of contemporary Latino culture as well as a critical look at the rituals of coming of age and the economic and social consequences of the quince parties. Julia Alvarez’s dedicated fans will be eager to hear her thoughts on this topic. It is a great book for anyone interested in American youth today parents, teachers, and teenagers themselves.

The Future Dictionary of America

This book was conceived by Safran Foer Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers as a way to bring over a hundred authors together to promote progressive causes in the November 2004 election. The book is an imagining of what a dictionary might look like about thirty years hence, when all of the world’s problems are solved and our current president is a distant memory. The book is by turns funny, outraged, utopian, and dyspeptic. Over 150 writers contributed to the book, including: Stephen King, Robert Olen Butler, Glen David Gold, Richard Powers, Susan Straight, Sarah Vowell, Billy Collins, C.K. Williams, Colson Whitehead, Donald Antrim, Jonathan Franzen, Edwidge Danticat, Edward Hirsch, Joyce Carol Oates, Katha Pollitt, Padgett Powell, Paul Auster, Anthony Swofford, Julia Alvarez, Susan Choi, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, and Art Spiegelman. Hardcover editions of the book will also include a CD compilation, with all new songs by the best musicians working. Among them: David Byrne, R.E.M., Death Cab for Cutie, Moby, Sleater Kinney, Flaming Lips, Tom Waits, Yo La Tengo, Bright Eyes, They Might Be Giants, Elliott Smith, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

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