1

Yo!

Julia Alvarez’s novel Yo! Practically calls to her readers from the shelf. This is because the word “Yo” is an informal English greeting and it is the subject “I” in Spanish. The title of the novel is the nickname of the central character, Yolanda Garcia, the unconventional third sister of the jovial Garcia family. Furthermore, this novel is distinctly Yolanda’s a protagonist without a voice and a portrait of her as an artist, lover, woman, stepmother, daughter, and all spin around the portrait’s subject in condemnation and praise. The novel is successfully devoted to the fully shaded three-dimensional sketch of Yolanda. It achieves these portrait through the voices of men and women who appear briefly and in some cases have a mysterious connection to their focus. That is most of the speakers stand at a particular distance from Yolanda and in a definite relation to her different from the other speakers. Narrated from various points of view, Yo gradually appears whole, intense, skinny, childless yet fertile, uncertain yet focused, and volatile yet private. A single- woman cultural collision who believes in women’s liberation and the voodoo and “spirit water” of the native island. Yolanda torn between two cultures that of the U.S., where she has lived since childhood and that of her native Dominican Republic, and finds her name like her identity is constantly tumbling.

I. Yolanda has grown up to be a writer and writes about;

A. Romantic relationship with the teacher

B. Intimate details about her mother and sisters

II. The injured parties

A. The story of her mother

B. The story of Yo’s Dominican cousins

C. The stalker’s viewpoint

III. Yo’s characterization

A. Lucinda’s description of Yolanda as the Latin American Barbie

IV. Conclusion

A. The father’s viewpoint