Q 01/05

Julia Alvarez, raised in the Dominican Republic until age ten, was actually born in which US city?

A) Los Angeles

B) Philadelphia

C) New York

D) San Francisco

Answer · why

C) New York

New York City was her birthplace in 1950, but her parents took her back to the Dominican Republic when she was three months old. She only returned to ...

Q 02/05

Which US president awarded Julia Alvarez the National Medal of Arts for storytelling about identity and family?

A) Barack Obama

B) George W. Bush

C) Bill Clinton

D) Joe Biden

Answer · why

A) Barack Obama

Barack Obama presented the medal, whose citation praised how her poetry and prose reveal the human capacity for strength in the face of oppression.

Q 03/05

The sisters in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies were murdered in 1960 for opposing which dictator?

A) Fulgencio Batista

B) Rafael Trujillo

C) Anastasio Somoza

D) François Duvalier

Answer · why

B) Rafael Trujillo

Rafael Trujillo held power in the Dominican Republic for three decades, and one historian wrote that the sisters' murders affected Dominicans more tha...

Q 04/05

After How the García Girls Lost Their Accents came out, which relative refused to speak to Julia Alvarez for months?

A) Her father

B) Her husband

C) Her grandmother

D) Her mother

Answer · why

D) Her mother

Her mother went silent because the novel drew so closely on the family's own story of exile. Alvarez's sisters were not pleased with the book either.

Q 05/05

What is unusual about the timeline of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez's three-part debut novel?

A) It runs in reverse

B) It covers one day

C) It repeats one summer

D) It skips the 1960s

Answer · why

A) It runs in reverse

It runs in reverse, opening with the four sisters as adults in 1989 and ending with their island childhood in 1956.