Banner for Family Lore: tropical leaves with pink lettering and a hibiscus flower
★★★

Introduction to Family Lore

When I saw that Elizabeth Acevedo had written a magical realism book for adults, I was over the moon. She is one of my favorite poets, and I’ve used The Poet X and Clap When You Land in the classroom multiple times. My expectations for Family Lore were high from the start! However, I found myself surprisingly disappointed–although there certainly were many bright spots. Below, I’ll tell you what I enjoyed and what I didn’t love so much about the book.

I want to add that this is just my opinion! If you haven’t read anything by Elizabeth Acevedo yet, add The Poet X and Clap When You Land to your reading list ASAP. They are in my top 10 YA books, and they got me to appreciate novels in verse.

Summary of Family Lore

Welcome to the Marte family. Told through two generations women, we are introduced to Acevedo’s modern magical realism. We have the older generation, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic: Flor, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila. Then we have the younger generation, composed of Ona and Yadi. Each woman has their own unique magic, and each tells their own story throughout the book. Flor’s gift, perhaps most central to this novel, is the ability to predict someone’s death. After foreseeing her own death, she announces that she’s throwing a living wake for herself, bringing the family together for one last salute. Love, secrets, scandal, and sisterhood prevail throughout this story about one magical family.

Context

Elizabeth Acevedo is a Dominican American writer and poet who has previously focused on YA novels in verse. She grew up in the Bronx and started her career in slam poetry, ultimately studying writing. She also taught English for a time. These experiences helped her to narrow her vision, which we can see across her body of literature. She focuses on themes of identity, particularly Dominican-American identity, womanhood, and youth. This interesting NPR article reviews her motivation behind writing her first novel for adults: to tell the complicated and rich story of a Dominican-American family and give a layered introduction to her female protagonists.

Family Lore Review

As I mentioned, this didn’t end up being one of my favorite reads. I’ll preface with the fact that I do generally enjoy books with an organized, methodical chaos. It sounds like an oxymoron. I know. But you know those books where it’s fun and crazy and colorful and messy, but it still leads to a point and everything feels carefully considered on the author’s part? That’s what I love, and that’s what I’ve seen from Acevedo before. For me–and this could just be personal–Family Lore strayed away from that and ventured into more “messy” territory. Again, this is just personal preference, and I do think others may enjoy it more! I’ll review the positive aspects first.

What worked well in Family Lore

While I still prefer her books written in verse, Acevedo has an feel for words. I would say that she is one of the strongest masters of rhythm and description in modern literature. Even though this book isn’t in verse, she still maintains her flow. The writing style is indisputably beautiful.

Additionally, she had a great concept. From the blurb–and on paper–I loved the ideas. This was what made me so surprised that I didn’t end up loving it. She has all the keys to success: a magical family, multiple generations, a focus on womanhood, an emphasis on culture…but it just didn’t come together for me in the end. I did like parts of it, however, especially the realistic and tight bonds between the women.

Finally, I liked Ant’s (Yadi’s love interest/childhood friend) character. He had a very interesting backstory, and I would have loved to read more about him or dive deeper into that. Like I’ll explain later, he really was the only character that stood out for me.

As a side note, I loved the cover. I thought it was the perfect representation of the book with the wicker chair, flowers, and colors. That artist is awesome!

What didn’t work as well for me

I would like to re-emphasize that this is the only book I haven’t loved by Elizabeth Acevedo. It feels like a sin to not love this book. However, I do still think that there is a group of people who would love Family Lore.

Acevedo’s main problem was that there was too much and nothing going on at the same time. She had so many main characters, all while focusing on the past and present and going between two countries. It’s too much. Somewhere along the way, the story got stuck and started to feel incoherent and discombobulated. There are several books where a focus on character growth over plot works, including others within the magical realism genre. However, most of them still drive toward a satisfying theme or a clear point. Here, I felt like the author wanted to spread me thin over 5.5 people’s perspectives and throw in whatever memories/ideas she wanted without having to commit to a point. There was the overarching wake, yes, but not much happening beyond that, and it felt very unorganized and not strung together well.

For example, the book is technically told from six women’s perspectives. For 75% of the book, I kept wondering, where’s the sixth person? I’ll spoil it: she came in late in the book. Was there a reason? Was there a secret or a plot device critical to this? No. Did she become a critical character? No–she got 1.5 chapters and then faded into the background. It was decisions like this that made me feel frustrated as a reader, because it felt illogical and poorly planned. How could I be expected to care about any of the characters when even the author seemed to view some as excess?

Now there’s the formatting. It could have been my digital version that made it more confusing. However, I felt that we were constantly being thrown back into memories that didn’t always tie in well with the present storyline. In some cases, they did, and I think that worked well. In most, however, it felt frustrating, because it felt relatively random.

Additionally, the writing style felt inconsistent and overly vulgar. It felt like Acevedo struggled to find her voice, and not just because there were six characters. She struggled to decide whether she wanted to be the hip, young narrator or the sage voice. Ultimately, she ended up somewhere between the two.

The vulgarity isn’t unique to Family Lore. I’ve found that a lot of modern magical realism is unnecessarily sexual. This book was no exception. One character’s magic was an “alpha vagina” (still didn’t love this, but it might be someone else’s cup of tea) and she is very sexual. As such, it felt like the author took any chance she found to say “titties” or “wet wet” or whatever nickname you want for it. Again, not my cup of tea, and I felt it went beyond diction or characterization because this wasn’t just Ona’s perspective–this also carried over to the other women’s perspectives.

I understand that Ona is the one interviewing the women in her family, so the other perspectives are interspersed with her viewpoint. However, it still felt strange to hear “titties” in a seventy year old woman’s perspective when she’s also talking about “babes” (as in babies). It felt like Acevedo gave a half effort to trying to sound mature, then gave up. I’m not sure if this is because she wanted to make it clear that Family Lore was not YA, but I personally didn’t love it, and I found that it detracted from the story.

Then she’d drop random words or phrases in Spanish into the middle of sentences. Personally, I found it annoying because it didn’t feel like it served a purpose (i.e., characterization or style). I understood what she was saying, and I didn’t have to look anything up, but it did still disrupt my reading multiple times, mostly because I was wondering why she was doing it. If she’d only done it in the dialogue, it would have worked. However, she put a lot of Spanish in the beginning, trailed off a bit, then added some more toward the end. Again, it felt messy and inconsistent.

This brings me to my other main complaint: the characters. Apart from Ant, I didn’t like any of the characters. Why? They all felt and sounded like the same person. In Acevedo’s defense, I have never seen anyone balance six people’s perspectives well. It’s hard enough to create one compelling character–now try to make six different, memorable characters, each with their own goals, histories, and identities. It’s borderline impossible.

And that’s why it didn’t work. None of the characters truly stood out. They definitely felt realistic and fleshed out, and I do believe she was very careful in her creation, but none of them were unique, and their voices blurred together. This made it hard to root for any of them, although their issues were sympathetic. You know when you go out with someone for a few hours and still like you don’t actually know anything about them by the end? That’s how it felt for me.

Finally, the ending felt a bit rushed. There was all the buildup to the living wake, and all the diving into backstories, then it felt like it just…ended. I didn’t hate this, to be clear. I think Acevedo did a good job leaving things open, and it did feel poignant. It just felt like there was still some things to be addressed. But again, it would be difficult to do that with how much she was juggling.

Recommendations A La Carte

Takeaways/Conclusion

This wasn’t the book for me. However, I’ve seen many other people love it, so maybe it will be different for you. I’d say that you likely won’t like it if you can’t do messy structure. If you can, you might love it. I will absolutely read what Elizabeth Acevedo comes out with next. I just hope that it’s more similar to The Poet X than Family Lore.

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