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In the Time of the Butterflies cover art

In the Time of the Butterflies

Written by: Julia Alvarez
Narrated by: Noemi de la Puente, Alma Cuervo, Bianca Carnacho, Melanie Martinez
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Publisher's Summary

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 General 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.

©1994 Julia Alvarez (P)2006 Recorded Books

What the critics say

"Though murder, torture, and imprisonment are ever-present, she wisely choses to focus on the personal lives of these young wives and mothers, full of love, beauty, and, especially, hope." ( Library Journal)

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Know history to not repeat it.

Pray for peaxe in the world so as not to repeat these injustices that happened.

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Deeply moving and inspiring

Everyone should read this book. The story of revolutionary women is both moving and inspiring. May we all have the courage that the Mirabal sisters showed. Viva las mariposas!

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