How long does it take to read In the Time of the Butterflies?
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez takes about 5 hours 58 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 58 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1994. 325 pages, about 89,375 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 56 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 58 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 43 minutes |
The page count is the median across 26 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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 Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas―“The Butterflies.” In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters―Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé―speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.
Subjects: Fiction, Women revolutionaries, History, Historia, Revolucionarias, Ficción
