Yolanda returns to the Dominican Republic after five years away and privately considers not going back to the United States.

Sofia hosts Carlos's 70th birthday party, ending years of estrangement after he refused to enter her home.

Sandi is committed to a psychiatric hospital after she stops eating and becomes convinced that evolution is reversing.

Yolanda's relationship with John deteriorates over their inability to communicate, and her therapist recommends she be hospitalized.

Yolanda and Rudy's college relationship collapses after he repeatedly pressures her for sex and calls her frigid.

Laura discovers the marijuana Fifi brought home, and Fifi chooses to spend a year in the Dominican Republic.

The sisters visit Fifi in the Dominican Republic and find she has become submissive to her boyfriend Manuel.

The sisters expose Fifi and Manuel's unsupervised tryst, and Laura orders Fifi to return to the United States.

Carlos tears up Yoyo's Teacher's Day speech after finding its self-celebrating words insubordinate and disrespectful.

Carla is bullied and physically exposed by boys at school, and a man in a car exposes himself to her on the street.

Yolanda sees snow falling outside her school window and screams, believing a nuclear bomb has fallen on New York.

The Garcia family dines with the Fannings, and Sandi witnesses Mrs. Fanning drunkenly kiss her father.

Secret police arrive at the Garcia compound looking for Carlos, who hides in a room built for that purpose.

The Garcia family prepares to flee the Dominican Republic, with each child allowed to bring only one toy.

Yoyo steals a kitten from its mother in the coal shed and is haunted by the mother cat for years afterward.

Pool 1 follows the Garcia family's headline story, beginning with Yolanda's uncertain return to the Dominican Republic and her adult sisters' fractured lives in America. It traces the sisters' teenage rebellion and assimilation, including Fifi's troubling transformation under Manuel's control and the intervention that brought her home. The pool moves through the parents' struggles to hold their family together — Carlos's furious rejection of Yoyo's self-expression and the family's difficult adjustment to New York life. It steps back into the childhood years to capture the dramatic arrival of secret police at the compound and the family's hurried flight from Trujillo's regime. The pool closes in the girls' earliest years on the island, with Yolanda's first act of defiant agency — stealing a kitten — and the haunting consequences that follow her for years.

The Garcia family's most pivotal moments, from Yolanda's uncertain return to the childhood escape from the Dominican Republic.

Yolanda gets a flat tire while gathering guavas, and a boy named Jose is beaten by guards because of her choices.

Carlos discovers love letters between Sofia and Otto revealing their sexual relationship and cuts off contact with Sofia.

Yolanda's lover Clive unknowingly sits beside Laura at a poetry reading as Laura shares intimate stories about her daughters.

Yolanda discovers a pro-con list John made about whether to marry her and feels devastated by the calculation.

Rudy calls Yolanda years after college claiming he wants to visit, and she realizes he only wants sex.

The Garcia girls begin forging their mother's signature on permission slips at boarding school to access social events.

Fifi and Manuel slip away to a run-down motel while chaperone Mundín refuses the sisters' pleas to intervene.

Laura abandons her inventing ambitions after an American patents the wheeled suitcase she had already envisioned.

Laura begins walking Carla to school after the exposure incident with the man in the car, and the bullying stops.

The Garcia family's downstairs neighbor stops them in their apartment building and calls them a racial slur.

Chucha, the Haitian servant who sleeps in a coffin, says a solemn farewell to the Garcia girls before their departure.

Mundín offers Yoyo clay in exchange for letting him see her and Fifi's private parts in the old coal shed.

A servant believes Sandi's drawing of a baby caused its illness, and when Sandi burns the drawing, the child recovers.

Carla gives her saint coin bank to the servant Gladys as a gift, but Gladys is dismissed from the household anyway.

The hunter advises Yoyo to wait before taking the kitten, then immediately goes into the woods to shoot animals.

Pool 2 captures the significant but less celebrated moments woven throughout the Garcia family's story. It traces specific incidents that complicated the sisters' adult lives, including the love letters that ruptured Sofia's relationship with her father and the pro-con list that shattered Yolanda's trust in John. It covers the teenage years in America and the Dominican Republic, from the sisters forging permission slips at boarding school to Fifi and Manuel's dangerous unsupervised night at a motel. The pool also illuminates the childhood years in both countries, from the casual racism the family faced in their New York apartment building to the loyal servant Chucha's tearful farewell on the day the family fled. It ends with the hunter's hypocritical advice to Yoyo about the kitten, the moral trigger that sets the novel's closing act in motion.

Behind-the-scenes moments and secondary beats that shaped the Garcia girls' lives across both countries.

Two men carrying machetes approach Yolanda's stranded car in the countryside, but they only help change the flat tire.

Sofia gives her father a wet, open-mouthed kiss on the ear during the party game, ending the celebration in shame.

Sandra is released from the psychiatric hospital and rejoins the family for Christmas, now dating a man she met during her stay.

Yolanda tells her parents she and John did not speak the same language and reveals she has become allergic to the word love.

Rudy draws anatomical diagrams for Yolanda because she does not know the names for her own reproductive organs.

Fifi confesses to bringing the marijuana home rather than allowing her three sisters to share the punishment with her.

The sisters confront Manuel directly, and he insists that men are meant to have control over women in relationships.

After reading Walt Whitman, Yoyo writes a Teacher's Day speech that for the first time sounds like her own voice.

Laura stops pursuing her invention ambitions entirely and channels her hopes for American success into Yolanda's writing.

The police officer interviewing Carla about the exposure incident grows frustrated because she lacks the words to describe it.

Victor convinces the secret police that Carlos has secured a job in America, allowing the family to depart safely.

Fifi later recalls being bounced on a police officer's erection on the day the family fled the Dominican Republic.

Sandi sees a naked man carving statues in a shed, injures herself fleeing, and permanently loses her artistic impulse.

Carlos returns from a trip to America and distributes saint-shaped coin banks as gifts to each of his daughters.

Yoyo grabs the kitten despite the hunter's warning and bangs her drum loudly to muffle its cries as she flees.

Pool 3 focuses on the pivotal decisions and revelatory moments that shaped each Garcia sister differently. It begins with the charged encounter during Yolanda's Dominican visit and moves through the birthday party's shocking conclusion, then traces Sandi's fragile recovery, Yolanda's linguistic breakdown, and the specific cultural clashes that defined the sisters' adolescence. The pool captures the confrontation with Manuel, the destroyed speech that marked Carlos's rejection of Yoyo's American self, and Carla's silencing at the police station — moments where identity and language collide. Moving into childhood, it uncovers Victor's crucial deception that saved the family, Fifi's disturbing memory from the day of escape, and Sandi's transcendent discovery of her own face in a carved Virgin. The pool ends with Yoyo's impulsive act of seizing the kitten, the original sin that closes the entire novel.

The confessions, confrontations, and quiet revelations that set each Garcia sister on her own path.

Julia Alvarez

Novel

Fiction

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