Anu Recommends #30
Family Lore: an adult fiction debut by Elizabeth Acevedo
This is the second of three written-in-advance newsletter issues as the Storyteller shifts to a bi-weekly schedule until August 27.
Hi and welcome to the Storyteller!
Do you remember my Elizabeth Acevedo spotlight a few months ago? Here it is if you wanted to jog your memory; I even wrote about Family Lore (pub date: August 1, 2023) which I was given a chance to read and review early, but am sharing the publisher’s blurb again below for easier reference.
From bestselling, National Book Award–winning author Elizabeth Acevedo comes her first novel for adults, the story of one Dominican-American family told through the voices of its women as they await a gathering that will forever change their lives.
Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor forseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila.
But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets. Matilde has tried for decades to cover the extent of her husband’s infidelity, but she must now confront the true state of her marriage. Pastora is typically the most reserved sister, but Flor’s wake motivates this driven woman to solve her sibling’s problems. Camila is the youngest sibling, and often the forgotten one, but she’s decided she no longer wants to be taken for granted.
And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own: Yadi is reuniting with her first love, who was imprisoned when they were both still kids; Ona is married for years and attempting to conceive. Ona must decide whether it’s worth it to keep trying—to have a child, and the anthropology research that’s begun to feel lackluster.
Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces—one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.
Elizabeth Acevedo is the author of The Poet X—which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award—as well as With the Fire on High and Clap When You Land. She is a National Poetry Slam champion and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland.
Speaking to Writer’s Digest, Acevedo said about Family Lore,
I think my adult novel [forthcoming, Ecco, 2023] is going to show some of the ways that I’m now seeing verse affect my prose and playing with blanks and playing with spacing and borrowing techniques from poetry to kind of remix the way I’ve learned that I had to write prose.
In the same interview, she also spoke about learning, even embracing, patience during the writing and revising process, and how she learnt this through the making of candles (each candle has a curing time during which it sits untouched before it can be burned, which allows the fragrance to fully reveal itself),
Sometimes things just need time to come slowly into their own, to almost get concrete, and then you can start messing with it. So, for me, at least that language feels like it’s just part of the process. It’s curing. It’s not that I’m wasting time or losing time. It’s doing something.
Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable style doesn’t transition as smoothly as I was hoping between YA novels-in-verse to adult literary fiction, but there is undoubtedly enough in Family Lore to ensure a compelling story that makes you want more, and also want to keep an eye on her future offerings in this genre.
Flor Martes has always had an affinity with the spirit world, always known when or how someone would pass. When she decides to throw herself a living wake, everyone wonders whether this is it for their sister, their mother, their aunt. Her daughter Ona is an anthropologist. She has the sole first-person POV in the story as she records interviews with all her living family members in the countdown to the wake—the wake which becomes the final push she needs to turn her attention to recording and researching her own lineage, heritage, and family history. From the rural backwaters of the Dominican Republic, to the capital Santo Domingo, to modern-day New York City. The other POVs are third-person and feature different women across the generations of the Dominican-American Marte family.
I feel like this wouldn’t have been as engaging if I wasn’t used to Acevedo’s narrative voice and style already; many of the stories jump back and forth in time even within the same POV, and it can often feel a little jarring, even for those familiar. Oh, and there is a lot of untranslated Spanish sprinkled in throughout, which I’m not sure will have an English translation by the time this hits the shelves (my own Spanish is passable enough that I understood most of it, or at least gauged enough by context, but you might need to keep Google translate close at hand to begin with).
However, it is a testament to Acevedo’s writing that I was still invested in these very distinct, real, and three-dimensional characters, and wished we could have spent more time with each of them.
Recommended if you enjoy fragmented, non-linear, multi-POV, multi-generational, women-centric, magic-realism-infused family sagas.
As always, please feel free send in recommendations—books, movie, TV shows, authors to interview, ideas of what you’d like me to write on, rants/ramblings/excited monologues, GIFs and memes (especially them) and more. Just drop me a line and turn this into a conversation, even if just to say hi and let me know what you thought of the latest issue 😊 Or share this with someone you think might enjoy it.
Take care and see you in two weeks!
Anu
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