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sterling8 's review for:
Family Lore
by Elizabeth Acevedo
Around the World in 52 Books 2023: a book published in 2023
I listened to this as an audiobook and I enjoyed having it keep me company.
This is a book firmly in the magical realism tradition. Each sister in the Marte family has a gift, whether they realize it or not. Flor can see when someone will die. Pastora can tell if someone is lying. Matilde dances like magic, although she thinks she has no magic at all. The children of these women also have magic.
There are a lot of viewpoints in the book: Flor, Pastora, Matilde, Yadi(Pastora's daughter), Ona (Flor's daughter and the character who gets a first person POV). The book jumps back and forth in time. Very little time passes in the present-day storyline, in which Flor decides that she wants to have a living wake after seeing something about that idea in a documentary that her daughter got her to watch. Family members wonder why Flor has decided to do this and then the wake happens. Much of the book is looking into the past of the characters. We see the three sisters at different parts of their lives growing up in the DR and then moving to NYC as adults for various reasons. We see their relationships with each other and with men. Men are a very secondary part of this story and aren't nearly as interesting as the women, which is sort of too bad. We also see what it was like for Ona and Yadi growing up in NYC and what their relationship to the Dominican Republic and their grandmother was like. I frankly thought that the grandmother character (mother to the three sisters) made pretty much no good decisions throughout the entire book, never protected or stood up for her daughters, and was all about the "proper" thing to do instead of the right thing to do. Which is weird, because although we never learn much about it, the grandmother followed her heart instead of propriety and followed the sisters' father into the cane forests, leaving her well-to-do family behind for life with a farmer. Perhaps she had regrets? But we never know what she thinks.
The story feels very circular. We spiral back and forth in time, learning consequences of an action before seeing the action itself, seeing the end of a relationship before the beginning. I did like learning about the characters but I got tired of seeing Yadi put her entire life on hold when her first love has a tragedy happen to him (it didn't seem like Yadi got much characterization except for "she loves this guy"), I got tired of Mathilde not knowing her worth. I was waiting for a twist at the end that didn't end up happening. I guess the way the book was structured, there were no real surprises because most of the story had happened in the past. So the lives of the characters were rich and interesting but the plot was all backstory. This is a common fashion in literature these days and I have to say I'm over it. I'll give this author a try again though.
I listened to this as an audiobook and I enjoyed having it keep me company.
This is a book firmly in the magical realism tradition. Each sister in the Marte family has a gift, whether they realize it or not. Flor can see when someone will die. Pastora can tell if someone is lying. Matilde dances like magic, although she thinks she has no magic at all. The children of these women also have magic.
There are a lot of viewpoints in the book: Flor, Pastora, Matilde, Yadi(Pastora's daughter), Ona (Flor's daughter and the character who gets a first person POV). The book jumps back and forth in time. Very little time passes in the present-day storyline, in which Flor decides that she wants to have a living wake after seeing something about that idea in a documentary that her daughter got her to watch. Family members wonder why Flor has decided to do this and then the wake happens. Much of the book is looking into the past of the characters. We see the three sisters at different parts of their lives growing up in the DR and then moving to NYC as adults for various reasons. We see their relationships with each other and with men. Men are a very secondary part of this story and aren't nearly as interesting as the women, which is sort of too bad. We also see what it was like for Ona and Yadi growing up in NYC and what their relationship to the Dominican Republic and their grandmother was like. I frankly thought that the grandmother character (mother to the three sisters) made pretty much no good decisions throughout the entire book, never protected or stood up for her daughters, and was all about the "proper" thing to do instead of the right thing to do. Which is weird, because although we never learn much about it, the grandmother followed her heart instead of propriety and followed the sisters' father into the cane forests, leaving her well-to-do family behind for life with a farmer. Perhaps she had regrets? But we never know what she thinks.
The story feels very circular. We spiral back and forth in time, learning consequences of an action before seeing the action itself, seeing the end of a relationship before the beginning. I did like learning about the characters but I got tired of seeing Yadi put her entire life on hold when her first love has a tragedy happen to him (it didn't seem like Yadi got much characterization except for "she loves this guy"), I got tired of Mathilde not knowing her worth. I was waiting for a twist at the end that didn't end up happening. I guess the way the book was structured, there were no real surprises because most of the story had happened in the past. So the lives of the characters were rich and interesting but the plot was all backstory. This is a common fashion in literature these days and I have to say I'm over it. I'll give this author a try again though.