Comment on lamguage /style

Alvarez's unique structure in How the Garda Girls Lost Their Accents illustrates the struggle the girls endure in their search for identity. The novel consists of fifteen short stories that sometimes center on one family member and sometimes on several. The shifting perspectives provide only fragments of each character's life, never presenting a clear portrait of anyone of them. In an interview with Catherine Wiley in the Bloomsbury Review, Alvarez says she was thinking "relationally" when she structured the novel. "I was talking about the plot as a quilt, which is a way that I think a lot of women experience plot, as opposed to the hero directed on his adventures and conquering things and getting a prize, at all odds doing what he needs to do."