In the Time of the Butterflies is a historically-based, but fictionalized account of the lives of the renowned Mirabal sisters, their families, and their revolutionary activity under the increasingly oppressive Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. The novel is divided into 3 main sections, each with 4 chapters, and each section opens with the one surviving sister, Dedé, reflecting back on the past from present day (1994). Each of the chapters follows one of the four Mirabal sisters—Patria, Dedé, Minerva, and María Teresa--as their lives and ideologies develop, following a roughly chronological trajectory from 1938 to 1960.
Interestingly, Dedé’s chapters are always written in the...
