This whole story about Yolanda and the black cat was an interesting ending. As I said in my last post I feel that a lot of this book was focussed on Yolanda and I think that I liked her the best. I really liked the story of the drum, and as I noticed others have blogged I that it was really interesting to meet the characters as grown women and then see them as children.

I also, however, thought it was interesting that Alvarez ended the story with a super-condensed sum up of Yolanda’s life…
“Then we moved to the United States. The cat disappeared altogether. I saw snow. I solved the riddle of an outdoors made mostly of concrete in New York. My grandmother grew so old she could not remember who she was. I went away to school. I read books. You understand I am collapsing all time now so that it fits in what’s left in the hollow of my story?” (285)

This whole last chapter I pictured Yolanda as a young child, roaming around the yard with her drum and since we met Yolanda as a woman already it was almost as though she is a friend who is telling you about her childhood, so you picture a miniature version of the woman that you know presently…does that make any sense? Even though I don’t know her, it was just a different way of character development, somewhat tracing the four garcia girls’ personalities backwards.

When she refers to the “hollow” of her story, I was thinking that since Yolanda is the character who both begins and ends the book, both first and last chapter taking place on “the island”, perhaps all of the things that happen in between those two chapters…the good and the bad, life in the U.S. is just the filler, maybe what we are supposed to take away from her story are those parts that she shares with us about her time in the dominican republic? hmmm who knows.