A solid read on a historical situation that does not receive nearly the attention it would if it had happened elsewhere in the world.

Alvarez held my attention throughout, and she thoroughly and effectively developed all of the major characters. Her writing style is engaging and makes the story come alive.

I would have preferred for Alvarez to focus more on the historical facts surrounding the Mirabal sisters than for her to mix fact with fiction. At times, the fictional elements seemed to overshadow the sisters themselves. It would have been interesting to have a more in-depth exploration of their real lives and the events that led to their martyrdom.

Bottom line: This is an excellent novel for anyone looking to expose themselves to the historical Dominican Republic. It provides a fictionalized account that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. However, if you're looking for the facts, look elsewhere. This novel is a work of fiction and should be read as such.

Llosa's (in my opinion, a masterpiece) "The Feast of the Goat" has been on my mind ever since I read it, and finally, I managed to read this book. The book, which tells about Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic for thirty-one years, of course also mentions the Mirabal sisters who were killed by the regime. This is the story of the three sisters, nicknamed Mariposa (Butterfly), who rebelled against the regime and fell victim to a state-organized ambush on November 25. Incidentally, November 25 has since been designated as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women for this reason.

The book is engaging and reads itself. However, in my opinion, there are problems. Normally, I never like prefaces, but in this book, the part that is given as the afterword should, in my opinion, be the preface because the author is saying there that most of what we read is fabricated. She says, "I don't have a biographical fabric, I'm a novelist" and announces that she was able to collect very little material about these women's lives and imagined the rest. Yes, one can guess that it may not be possible to reach such details while reading and that the author has resorted to fabrication, but I didn't know that she would go so far as to change the events and the dates. I would have preferred to learn this at the beginning of the book, not at the end, and read the book with this knowledge.

In other words, this book is actually not about the Mirabal sisters. It is about Julia Alvarez, whose own family was also a victim of Trujillo's dictatorship and who had to flee to America as a child, and her - somewhat romantic - imagination including the Mirabal sisters. Well, does this make this book worthless? No, but it has changed the relationship I had with the text quite a bit. I think the author has taken a bit of an easy way out, frankly, without going overboard. Again, Cercas' "The Impostor" comes to my mind. That, for example, was such an effective and experimental way of writing a life story. He had added all the possibilities of fabrication to his work. Julia Alvarez, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have bothered much with this.

The story of the women is of course very effective - it very well explains how infinite the dynamics that politicize people are and that those who witness certain things may not always be heroic figures full of courage. It is written without over-dramatizing or heroizing, and I liked this. But the impression it leaves on me will never be like that of "The Feast of the Goat", that's for sure.

I read this in Spanish because I thought it was originally written in Spanish, being written by a Dominican author and set in the Dominican Republic. But no; it was written in English and I just got some extra reading practice.

This is a non-fiction-told-as-fiction, the dramatization of real events. It is the story of the real-life Mirabal sisters, who were members of the underground resistance to the Dominican dictator Trujillo. The story is told over many years in separate chapters from the points of view of all four sisters, reflecting their very different personalities and motivations. The view of the youngest is told through her diary entries.

This is the kind of book our book club was founded for--a story of strong, admirable female characters. It is tense and inspiring, and although you know how the story is going to end (the first page of the story consists of the epitaphs of three of the sisters), it still manages to be horrifying and gut-wrenching, especially with the knowledge that it actually happened. It's a must-read for women and revolutionaries alike. It offers a unique perspective on a dark period in history and showcases the power and courage of these remarkable women.

The author's writing style brings the story to life, making it easy to become immersed in the world of the Mirabal sisters. You can feel their fear, their determination, and their love for each other and their country. It's a powerful and moving book that will stay with you long after you've finished reading it.

I was truly bored and disappointed by this.

The initial chapters, which covered the childhood and schooldays of the Mirabal sisters, seemed rather promising. And I have no complaints regarding the final scenes, where the tension was indeed cranked up very tightly.

However, in the middle, there was a wasteland of mundane domesticity. Alvarez doesn't seem to know how to make it interesting, even when it's flavored with low-key revolutionary activity. As for the latter, I could never quite figure out what the active members of the family were aiming to achieve, aside from simply registering their opposition to Trujillo. Their actions seemed highly unlikely to cause the regime anything more than trivial annoyance, although they did manage to draw attention to themselves.

They persisted for years, prodding and poking this extremely dangerous beast until, unsurprisingly, they got themselves shot. It all comes across as rather pointless, which surely wasn't Alvarez's intention. Nor can she have meant to make Trujillo the main attraction, yet in fact, he's ten times more interesting than anyone else in the book. This reveals more about them than it does about him.

None of this is intended to belittle the Las Mariposas of history, about whom I know nothing. I am merely reacting to the way Alvarez portrays them here, which for the most part is truly very tedious.

Well, this was truly a disappointment.

Back in grammar school, there was a biographical series for young readers known as “Childhoods of Famous Americans.” Allegedly, it told the stories of just that. However, they were almost entirely fictitious, or in some cases, complete inventions, like that of Virginia Dare, but hung on a few skeletal facts.

In this book, what is true is that the four Mirabal sisters grew up in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship, which they fought against. Sadly, three of them were assassinated by him just one year before his own downfall. Some of the other events might be true or at least based on true events, but the author admits that this is a work of fiction.

So, in the end, we have the four sisters fighting to overthrow a dictator, almost like a combination of Louisa May Alcott and Che Guevara. There is no real sense of how truly horrible Trujillo was, except for his taste for adolescent girls. But really, there is so much more to tell, and this book left me with an empty feeling, almost like it was a slightly more adult Nancy Drew story.

At one point, something happened to one of the sisters while in prison, but the author preferred to shy away from anything indelicate. This doesn't mean I wanted gory details in the book, but a better sense of the horror of Trujillo might have given more weight to it.

For anyone truly interested, I would highly recommend Mario Vargas Llosa’s book “The Feast of the Goat.” It delves deeper into the horror and complexes of the dictator, similar to Hitler's attempts to reconstruct his own racial identity, and also offers a thrilling novelization of the eventually successful plot to assassinate Trujillo. I would further recommend Edwidge Danticat´s “The Farming of the Bones,” which is based on the mass genocide perpetrated by Trujillo in 1937 against the Haitians at the Massacre River, which divides the island into two nations.

Next to these, this book unfortunately seemed rather insipid to me. Does the author write well? Yes. Did I feel the love between the sisters? Yes. However, I would have liked more substance to the story, and it's a pity that the author lacked the courage of the Mirabal sisters in telling it.

The first time I traveled through Mexico, I chanced upon this remarkable book.

I became completely engrossed in it and finished reading it within three days. As I approached the end of the story, just before the looming tragedy was about to strike, the eldest and undoubtedly the bravest sister was reminiscing about a particular moment from her youth.

She recalled that she and her sisters were playing a game, in the darkness, behind their parents' farmhouse. The concept of the game was to step off the porch, into the pitch-black night, and venture as far as they could before turning back.

What she vividly remembered was how everyone always assumed she was fearless. However, on the contrary, she felt an overwhelming amount of fear. She couldn't catch her breath, she had no idea if she could actually do it.

But despite all that, she simply took a step forward anyway. She felt the fear, yet walked right into it. This really resonated with me at that time.

I had embarked on this crazy adventure all by myself, armed only with a backpack and a map, in the middle of nowhere, at a young age.

No one could fathom what I was doing, and truth be told, neither could I. But somehow, deep down, I knew that I had to do it. I needed to conquer this unknown. I had never come across such a precise and accurate description of what that exact feeling was like.

It was as if the author had peered into my soul and captured that very essence of my adventure.

Just like the new tablestones, I lie down on the bed and turn page by page, reading the story only. In these days when the darkness around me has taken hold, and if I'm not careful, I've fallen to the bottom of the mire. Choosing this book might seem a bit strange. The story is about three sisters who you know are going to be killed in a bad way, but you read all those 380 pages to get to know them well so that you can be truly affected by their deaths and be more horrified by the lives of dictatorships similar to Trujillo.

Aside from the fact that the subject is engaging and we already knew about Trujillo and the Mirabal sisters to some extent before, the narration of the story is also interesting, engaging, and vivid. Well, it's not a masterpiece like "One Hundred Years of Solitude," but not everything is "One Hundred Years of Solitude" after all.

It's a book to read, full of sorrow, sometimes extremely hopeful, and sometimes extremely hopeless...

Favorite novel so far this year (2018).

The last twenty-five pages are all outbursts of sobs & of the truly ugly kind, by an inconsolable reader. Oh this one is GREAT! It's like the smudgy words of a wounded family tree, the very human lasting lamentation.

There are 2 novels* in existence (that I'm wholly aware of) that put the D.R. under the Trujillo regime under a magnifying glass. This illumination reveals the complexities and the ugliness of absolute dictatorships (to be deftly simplistic) and the fraught societal norms (to say the least). But we Americans don't know nothing of such tyrannical totalitarianisms, right?

The Mirabal sisters are heroes, martyrs. Wealthier than other families, they all have the Revolutionary Heart that goes well with legend and can be displayed in almost majestic light in literature, as occurs here. How they get to this place of public adulation, or near Sainthood, it is your absolute pleasure to read about in Alvarez's stunner. Definitely a major work of Latin American Historical fiction (the other perfect novel that is a companion piece in many respects to this is Mario Vargas Llosa's opus "The Feast of the Goat"*).

Basically, it's "Little Women" in hell, a story that combines the charm and warmth of a family drama with the harsh and unforgiving reality of a dictatorship. It makes you think about the sacrifices that people make for their beliefs and the power of love and hope in the face of adversity.

Long live the butterflies!

#The Mirabal Sisters were four patriotic sisters in the Dominican Republic who lived during the dictatorship of #Trujillo and paid the price for their fight against tyranny and injustice in this #dictatorship.

In the book "#In the Time of the Butterflies", you will read the story of life under a dictatorial government, the sisters' entry into political activities, and finally the killing of three of the sisters by the dictator in 1960 in the form of a story.

The author in the afterword of the book says:

"Women who accomplished a task that only a few men and a handful of women were willing to do. In the terrifying 31-year regime of Trujillo, any sign of disagreement with him would ultimately lead to the death of the dissatisfied individual and often his family members. Despite all this, the Mirabal sisters put their lives at risk. I constantly asked myself what gave them this special courage?"

Finally, Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa are killed by the dictator. Six months later, Trujillo was terrorized. The killing of the Mirabal sisters turned them into a "symbol of the popular and feminist struggle". In 1999, the United Nations Organization, in honor of them, declared November 25 as the Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

Diktatör neleri öldürür? Ona karşı gelen her şeyi.

First, it kills the people. Then their dreams and thoughts.

But what does a dictator feed on? The appetite of those who desire its downfall.

Certainly, the people who are desired cannot suppress these feelings forever, which is why dictatorships will eventually fall.

Like Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic with blood for 31 years.

It was not big weapons that brought him down. It was the mothers who could not bear the death of their children, and the hungry people who desired freedom.

Among those who brought him down, there were dedicated brothers who worked wholeheartedly.

Brothers who left their children with their grandmothers and fought, pushing the comfortable life with their wives to the opposite side.

Like Patria Mercedes, Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Dede.

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Julia Alvarez fictionalizes the lives of the four sisters, but this is not an "idealized" fiction. All four of them tell their own stories in separate sections. First, they talk about their childhoods and dreams. Then about their educations, marriages, motherhoods, and struggles. In 1960, three of the four sisters were killed, and the remaining one was Dede, who carried a heavy burden.

Perhaps because Alvarez's life was also changed by Trujillo, she told the sisters' story more touchingly and with more ownership.

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The book "In the Time of the Butterflies," which revolves around the same theme, also deeply affected me due to the influence of reading it recently. There were places where I couldn't hold back my tears, and places where I bit my lip out of nervousness. Reading about the evils that the mind cannot imagine is always difficult. Like the weight of every chained body.

I really hope you can read this book.

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Translated by Ege Candemir, with a cover photo by Darrell Gulin~

The Mirabal Sisters, the "heroic" female resistors during the dictatorship of Trujillo who ruled the Dominican Republic for over thirty years starting from the 1950s. In quotes because actually none of them wanted to be heroes. None of them had superpowers, nor were they people related to being heroes. Maybe except for Minerva, who was born with a rebellious spirit. Alvarez tells chronologically and in a very solid language from each sister's mouth how a regime could turn even the most ordinary people into resistors. In the last thirty pages of the book, I was much more affected by the reckoning of the remaining sister, Dede, with what had happened, compared to the general story. In fact, with the note attached at the end of the book, I finished the novel with my hair standing on end. I also found the author's reckoning at the end of the book with the girls' story very sincere and just. The author says, "I didn't write this novel to be a document in history. Unfortunately, documents cannot have an impact on people. However, novels are one of the most beautiful ways to reach people's hearts."

This story of the Mirabal Sisters is not just a historical account but a powerful exploration of the human spirit and the ability to resist in the face of oppression. It shows how ordinary women can become extraordinary through their courage and determination. The author's use of the sisters' voices and perspectives adds depth and authenticity to the narrative, making it a truly engaging read.

Overall, this book is a testament to the power of storytelling and its ability to inspire and move readers. It reminds us that history is not just about facts and figures but about the people who lived through it and the choices they made. The Mirabal Sisters will always be remembered as symbols of resistance and hope, and their story will continue to be told and retold for generations to come.

This is a fictionalized account of the actual individuals and events related to the freedom revolution in the Dominican Republic.

When I began reading the book, I turned to Wikipedia to learn about the Mirabal sisters. As I read, I felt a tinge of disappointment as I had hoped for more details about the freedom revolution itself. Instead, the novel only skirted around the revolution, discussing its impact on the lives of the people without delving into the revolution directly. Additionally, there was the humanizing of the Mirabal sisters. I found myself debating and counter-arguing this portrayal of the legendary and brave Mirabal sisters. After all, not all revolutionaries are like Bhagat Singh. The story emphasizes that even these renowned Mirabal sisters were human, with their own insecurities despite their courage. The author justifies her reasons for such humanization, which I myself was doing in my counterarguments. We, ordinary people, need to believe that we too can have the courage! Instead of thinking that a revolution requires extraordinary people to be heroes.

More than the heroes who sacrificed their lives, it is the family members left behind who suffer even more. Dede... A salute to the author.

"Why did the gringos pull out?" I was eager to know. "They got cold feet. Afraid we're all communists. They say they don't want another Fidel. They'd rather have a dozen Trujillos."

The history repeats itself over and over again. Why does it keep repeating? How can we prevent it? This is a question that lingers in my mind as I reflect on the events described in the book.