IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES

Religion, family, and revolutionary values are put to the test in this visually striking interpretation of Alvarez’s bestselling 1994 novel about the shifting loyalties of the Mirabal sisters.

Before launching into the story's multiple perspectives, Quiles provides a helpful spread of family photos ranging from 1938 to 1994. No one was truly safe during the years of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, but Dedé Mirabal has the unhappy distinction of being the only one of four sisters who survived the era. With each sister getting her own color palette in Quiles' interpretation, Dedé sets out to tell her niece Minou the tragic intertwined stories of Patria, Minerva, and María Theresa, wanting Minou to know the real women behind the legendary "butterflies." Patria, the eldest Mirabal, is bathed in yellow-orange as she contemplates becoming a nun. Instead, she starts a family with her husband, Pedrito, and eventually starts letting her sister Minerva’s revolutionary group meet on her land. Minerva, with a green background, devotes herself to the revolutionary cause early when she makes a school friend named Sinita, who confides that Trujillo killed her uncles, who'd been working against him. The youngest sister, María Theresa, starts out with optimism in her pinkish-purple hue as she writes in her diary. While Trujillo and his cronies circle the Mirabals, they each respond differently to the danger. Quiles keeps the character figures relatively simple and their clothing plain, adding the most detail in panels with close-ups of eyes. Whether scared or in love or caught in religious thrall, the eyes are the windows to the Mirabal sisters’ souls.

As a portrait of life under a repressive regime, this retelling successfully highlights the sisters' impossible choices.