In the Time of the Butterflies Lib/E

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. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Raphael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. 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. 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.

About the Author :
Julia Alvarez has written several novels for adults and for young readers, including Before We Were Free, winner of the ALA's Pura Belpré Award. Her acclaimed first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and the American Library Association Her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award. She grew up in the Dominican Republic before immigrating to the United States at the age of ten. She is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College, Vermont. Alma Cuervo is an Earphones Award-winning narrator and a stage actress and singer who has also performed in film and television. She holds an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, from which she graduated in 1976 alongside Meryl Streep. She starred in the role of Madame Morrible in the first national tour of Wicked. Melanie Martinez has toured across the country with the National Shakespeare Company and performed with many other award winning New York City theatre companies including the Jean Cocteau Repertory Company (performing with them in Sao Paulo, Brazil), Target Margin, Salt Theatre Company, and Inverse Theatre Company. In 2005, Melanie became the first host of the PBS KIDS Sprout network's original program The Good Night Show and by mid-2006 had achieved true pop icon status. Melanie continues to work on television, appears in print campaigns, narrates audio books, and performs in the variety show, Of The Moment. Melanie lives in downtown Manhattan with her husband and son. In her spare time, Melanie is an official Wish Granter and Wish Guide for the Make-a-Wish Foundation and volunteers with the Lower East Side Girl's Club. Blanca Camacho was born on November 19, 1956 in New York City, New York, USA. She is known for her work on Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) and Closer (2004). Noemi de la Puente is a New York-based actor and director. She attended the University of Iowa, and is a founding member of Dramatic Question Theatre.

Review :

"Wonderful...Skillfully weaves fact and fiction, building to a gut-wrenching climax."