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 Gen. 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. The Butterflies were
extraordinary women. Minerva, once the object of the dictator's desire,
had dared to publicly slap his face. Devout Patria found her calling to
the uprising through the church. Alluring - and vain - Maria Teresa
joined in pursuit of romance. Only Dede, the practical one, the most
diligent in her duty to family and tradition, kept apart. And only she
survived to see that their names were remembered. Now, through the art
and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live
again. And Dede joins them as a heroine of equal courage.
