Julia Alvarez

In the early 1960s in the Dominican Republic, twelve-year-old Anita learns that her family is involved in the underground movement to end the bloody rule of the dictator General Trujillo.

Worried that Papa Espada cannot find a job, Ta̕ Lola, Juanita, Miguel, and the "Sword" sisters decide to start a bed and breakfast at Colonel Charlebois's Vermont house.

Although ten-year-old Miguel is at first embarrassed by his aunt, Tia Lola, when she comes to Vermont from the Dominican Republic to stay with his mother, his sister, and him after his parents' divorce, he learns to love her.

When three girls and their father visit for a week in the summer, it takes Ta̕ Lola to make Miguel forget his unhappiness at the absence of any boys and embrace the adventures that ensue.

Fifteen-year-old Milly Kaufman is an average American teenager until Pablo, a new student at her school, inspires her to search for her birth family in his native country.

"When celebrated writer Alma Cruz inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she turns it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace, but they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sancctuary for their true narratives."--...