From The Bookshelves: Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo

We’ve featured novelist Elizabeth Acevedo on the immprof blog before, for her 2020 novel Clap When You Land. Her latest novel, Family Lore, is another book where immigration forms the backdrop of a compelling fictional tale. Here’s the pitch:

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 foreseen 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: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own.

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.

Family Lore is a Good Morning America Book Club pick, if you need more incentive to pick it up. Also, WaPo has a nice write up about the work–calling it a “love letter to immigrant sisterhood.”

-KitJ