Reviews with content warning for Pregnancy - Family Lore

"But nothing has ever felt as warm as being known so well that someone could hand you a monstrosity they made with their own hands after learning you."

Family Lore has a lot of great ingredients for a great book. As usual, Elizabeth Acevedo's prose is absolutely delicious, I want to eat it! There's also a lot of great themes and character moments in this. In particular, this looks at womanhood in a complicated but loving family structure, also this is very unabashed in how it explores sexuality. I also found Ona really interesting (her magical power is, and I shit you not, a magical super-vagina) and I liked the family dynamics.

Despite all the great parts of Family Lore, it's a bit underbaked. There's too many POVs and the plot is meandering across a long timeline in a non-linear way, to the point this feels like an anthology of slice of life stories. At one point I even forgot that this was about a woman who can predict deaths having a living wake. With this many somewhat unrelated plotlines and backstories, I couldn't care for them all.

Content Warnings

sarafrancesreads's review against another edition

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

🌟 REVIEW 🌟

#FamilyLore by Elizabeth Acevedo

⭐️ Rating: 4/5 ⭐️

Synopsis: 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. 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.

My thoughts: As always, I love stories of strong women. This story highlights a family of strong women and includes a sense of magical realism, with each of the women in the Marte family holding a special “gift”. It shifts between the viewpoints of each of these women, the implications of their gifts, and explores the bonds of family, and lessons learned as the family faces the meaning of life and death with a living wake for one of the sisters, a mother and aunt. Although many reviewers dislike the multiple viewpoints, I liked the short chapters and intermixed perspectives. I will say that some of the story lines did feel a bit drawn out, and didn’t really have a clear resolution by the end of the book. Overall, I feel like this book pulled at my heartstrings, and did a good job of making me reflect on the importance of family and what it means to be living.

Content Warnings

clairelisebella's review

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dark emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

I can’t put my finger on why this book didn’t work for me. It had a lot of good things going for it — I love magical realism, multi-gen family sagas, and a dark/macabre tone. But it just didn’t land. The pacing was off, the format with the sporadic transcripts and asides from Ona were unbalanced, and the intermixed Spanish felt distracting instead of immersive. I inched through it and I’m glad I finished it, but I didn’t have anything pushing me forward.

Content Warnings