History Readers Book Club Meeting – September

In the Time of Butterflies

Julia Alvarez

Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies is “beautiful, heartbreaking and alive … a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo.” (Concepción de León, New York Times)

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies.