Julia Alvarez's Before We Were Free

The Dominican Republic's brutal regime completely got skipped in my high school and college World History studies class. I never knew there was a dictator. I never knew there was a rebellion. I never knew the Americans got involved, to any extent. So, why now is it that after reading a piece of fiction in young adult literature that I am finding all of this out? Me, a guy who boasts his historical knowledge to his friends on a relatively frequent basis. Well, some might say there is simply too much history in this world to be covered in a few semesters, or even over the course of an entire collegiate career. Simply put, however, this novel would be important to teach for its historical informative value as much as its literary value.

I must say, at the beginning of the book I was anticipating a coup. Maybe it is everything that has recently happened in Tunisia, Egypt especially, and the rest of the Arab world, but I was disappointed when the fiction wasn't heading in that direction. The map of the compound the family built and resided in was confusing as it prefaced the entire novel. I didn't understand what I was supposed to interpret from the map. However, it served as a great reference when the spying in the novel intensified, especially when the group who wanted to stage a coup starting meeting outside the window of our narrator. We were allowed an inside look at just how this part of the rebellion began and where it physically started.

Cultural perspectives are vital to creating a peaceful, more tolerant world. This book serves as a terrific perspective of a young girl growing up in a dictatorship who didn't quite understand the effects of such a government. The book pulls all the right punches, and surprisingly to me, the girl's father and uncle (or brother? it escapes me now) are killed. I really expected more of a happy ending for her family. Alvarez got it right, though, as clearly not everyone survives staging a coup against a brutal dictator, and we got a very real depiction of the repercussions of committing such an act. I think that, with explanation and background information prefacing the novel, this would be a great book to teach in a young adult lit class or a class geared towards world lit. I would certainly entertain giving my students in the future the option of reading this novel.