Some grouchy reviewers don't think that it does a good enough job of building up the historical context, but we disagree. In the Time of the Butterflies was selected for the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read (really cool). But Alvarez addressed the issue first: her quartet of sisters in In the Time of the Butterflies were the original literary heroines resisting Trujillo.

Alvarez is not only the first in this line but also the first to write about the dictatorship in English. In fact, for many readers, this novel may be the first time they're hearing about Trujillo and the US's involvement in the Dominican Republic.Īlvarez is a literary trailblazer: Nobel-Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa would write about the same dictatorship in his The Feast of the Goat in 2001 and Junot Díaz does the same in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2007. But Trujillo's name doesn't spring to mind for a lot of people listing off 20th century political Big Bads. Rafael Trujillo was among the baddest of baddies, ruling the island nation with an iron fist and a creepy arsenal of scare tactics, including rape, murder, and downright terror. The book is famous because it's the first English-language literary look at the infamous Trujillo era in the Dominican Republic. Julia Alvarez' 1994 novel In the Time of the Butterflies gives fictional voices to the real-life political martyrs, the Mirabal sisters.

Sounds like a myth or a fairy tale, right? But no-it's the hard truth of the 20th-century Dominican Republic. Three brave revolutionary sisters are murdered in cold blood by an evil regime. In the Time of the Butterflies Introduction

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