After four years in Bahrain, they moved to New York City, where her mother then began graduate school in special education at Columbia University.

While a senior in college, Alvar returned to the Philippines for the first time in ten years and began recording her experiences of Manila which provided material for her stories.

[6] These characters are part of the Philippine diaspora: workers dispersed around the globe for economic reasons to work as maids and nurses and in other jobs.

[7] Alvar offers "deft portraits of transnational wanderers" who are "blessed and cursed with mobility," according to New York Times critic J. K. Ramakrishnan,[8] with a major theme in her work being the cultural conflicts of immigrants.

[8] Chicago Tribune critic Amy Gentry described Alvar's prose as "precise and patient" with a gift for "grounded human-scale metaphors".