In this brilliantly characterized novel, the voices of all four sisters - Minerva, Patria, Maria Teresa, and Dede - speak across the decades, to tell their own stories - from hair ribbons to gunrunning to prison torture - and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Everyone knows of Las Mariposas - "The Butterflies." Now, three decades later, Julia Alvarez, also a daughter of the Dominican Republic and long haunted by these sisters, immerses us in a tangled and dangerous moment in Hispanic Caribbean history to tell their story in the only way it can truly be understood - through fiction. Raphael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Julia Alvarez’ In the Time of the Butterflies takes a big, complicated story of a country undergoing political persecution and revolutionand makes it completely personal. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic.
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