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Intro
Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia García are four young sisters in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s. They have a large extended family who all live on the same property. The family is wealthy and well-respected. One day, Yolanda finds a family of stray cats and takes a kitten from its mother to keep as a pet. She later feels guilty, and Yolanda has visions of the mother cat for the rest of her life. Carlos, the girls’ father, often travels to New York and brings back gifts. After one trip he brings Carla a toy bank made of metal, shaped into the image of the Virgen Mary ascending to the sun. Carla gives the bank to one of the family’s maids, and when Carlos and Laura find out, they fire the maid. The girls take art lessons at a neighbor’s house. At the house, Sandra accidentally comes across a naked man with a chain around his neck sculpting a statue of Mary. Later, the sculpture is revealed at church, and Sandra sees that the man sculpted the statue’s face in her likeness. Yolanda is close with her cousin Mundín, but their parents try to separate them because they are different genders. Mundín coerces Yolanda into showing him her genitals.
The Dominican Republic is under the rule of Rafael Trujillo, a militant dictator. The government comes after the Garcías because Carlos is involved in political groups conspiring to take down Trujillo. After a run-in with the secret police, the family flees to New York City. In New York, the Garcías are uncomfortable as they struggle with money and live above a racist neighbor. Shortly after arriving, the family goes out to dinner with an American couple, the Fannings. Sandra witnesses Mrs. Fanning drunkenly kiss Carlos in the bathroom. Sandra and Carlos are disturbed, and Carlos tells Sandra not to tell Laura about the incident. Yolanda, now a fourth grader, sees snow for the first time and panics, thinking it is a nuclear bomb.
Carlos is a doctor, and he eventually begins a private practice. The family’s financial situation improves, and they move to Long Island. Carla is in middle school, and her classmates bully her because she is Dominican. A man also exposes himself to Carla as she walks home from school one day. Yolanda becomes a precocious English student, and her teachers ask her to write a speech for the school. Yolanda draws inspiration from a Walt Whitman poem. When she reads the speech to Carlos, he tears it up in anger, calling it disrespectful. Yolanda compares him to a dictator. Tension between the girls and their parents grows as the girls come of age. As a teenager, Sofia gets in trouble when Laura finds marijuana in her room. As punishment, Sofia stays in the Dominican Republic for a year. There, she dates her misogynistic and controlling cousin Manuel.
When Yolanda is in college, she has a relationship with Rudy that ends because Yolanda refuses to sleep with him. The experience damages Yolanda’s self-confidence for many years. She wants to fit in with her classmates but feels different from them because she is Dominican. Yolanda later marries a man named John. She loves him, but he is abusive. Yolanda feels like he doesn’t understand her because they come from different cultures and because John doesn’t speak Spanish. Descending into a mental breakdown, Yolanda completely loses the ability to make sense of John’s speech. She leaves him and moves back in with her parents. Laura and Carlos admit Yolanda to a mental institution when Yolanda begins to communicate only through lines of literature that she has memorized. Yolanda falls in love with her therapist, Dr. Payne. She hallucinates a black bird crawling out of her mouth and attacking Dr. Payne.
Sandra also has a mental breakdown wherein she thinks she is experiencing evolution in reverse, and that she is turning into a monkey. She reads obsessively, hoping that books can help her remember how to be human.
Sofia meets Otto while she is traveling in Colombia. The two have a romantic relationship, but Otto returns to Germany and Sofia returns to her parents’ house in New York. Carlos finds Otto’s letters to Sofia and explodes in anger when he realizes that Sofia slept with Otto. Immediately afterwards, Sofia moves out of her parents’ house. She marries Otto, and Carlos refuses to speak to her for years. Later, Sofia has a son with Otto. Carlos is happy because the baby is the first boy in the family, and it is named after Carlos. Carlos agrees to have his birthday party at Sofia’s house—the event coincides with Sofia’s son’s christening. Sofia tries to make her father’s birthday perfect, hoping to reconcile with him. Everyone plays a game wherein Carlos is blindfolded, and he must guess who is kissing him on the cheek. Every time, he guesses each of his daughters’ names except Sofia’s. Offended, Sofia kisses her father’s ear using her tongue. This angers Carlos and ends the party.
Now well into adulthood, Yolanda travels to the Dominican Republic. She visits her aunts and cousins, and she struggles to speak fluent Spanish to them. Yolanda’s aunts ridicule her for being Americanized, and because Yolanda is unaware of how dangerous it is to be a solo female traveler in the area. Yolanda drives around the island in search of guavas. At one point she gets lost and panics when she encounters two men who seem dangerous, but the men help change Yolanda’s flat tire and leave her unharmed. Yolanda’s family assumes that she will soon return to the U.S., but she secretly hopes to start a new life in the Dominican Republic.
