Title & author
Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
Synopsis
In Family Lore, Acevedo’s first novel for adults, we follow the Marte women, four sisters and two of their daughters. Through recounts of the sisters’ childhood in the Dominican Republic and eventual immigration to New York, as well as their present day relationships with one another, life, and their selves, we see the women at their fullest. Family Lore places women across every stage of life front and center.
Who should read this book
Fans of Bad Fruit and Of Women and Salt
What we’re thinking about
The complexity of understanding who we are and how we’ve been shaped by our family.
Trigger warning(s)
Sexism, abuse, colorism, classism, sexual assault, substance abuse (see more)
"The generation I was raised by felt like their relationship to their body was very othered," says Elizabeth Acevedo in an interview with NPR. "When I speak to my cousins, when I think about myself, it's been a return to desire, a return to the gut, a return to health in a way that isn't necessarily about size but is about: who am I in this vessel and how do I love it?" In Family Lore, Acevedo’s first novel for adults, we follow the Marte women, four sisters and two of their daughters (HarperCollins, 2023). Through recounts of the sisters’ childhood in the Dominican Republic and eventual immigration to New York, as well as their present day relationships with one another, life, and their selves, we see the women at their fullest. Family Lore places women across every stage of life front and center.
Acevedo crafts a multigenerational tale, focusing on the Marte sisters (Matilde, Flor, Pastora, and Camila) and two of their daughters (Ona, Flor’s daughter, and Yadi, Pastora’s daughter), as well as memories of their mother, Mamá Silvia. Most of the women possess an affinity—Mamá Silvia of births, Matilde maybe or maybe not for dance, Flor of deaths, Pastora of truths, Camila for herbalism, Ona an alpha vagina, and Yadi a taste for limes. Through the course of interviews with Ona, we learn not only about their affinities, but also their wants, needs, and desires.
But “how do lineages of women from colonized places, where emphasis is put on silent enduring, learn when and where to confide in their own family if forbearance is the only attitude elevated and modeled?” Ona asks (Acevedo, 138-9). By showing us the interiors of each of these women, and through the format of Ona’s interviews with her family, forbearance is cast aside, histories and identities reclaimed. Acevedo crafts each of these women—affinities and beyond—to the fullest, not shying away from age, physical encounters, and much more. We see them across all ages at their most mundane (Yadi’s “brown poo was gorgeous, full of healthy stomach bile”), in satisfaction (“I reached down with my own fingers to inspect the wetness there”), in fear (“that her sister would see her scarred, bruised, withered like rotted fruit, made her gag”), in passion (“Matilde in a fast-double spin, arms flung out”) and in grief (“the sob she attempted to pull back instead echoed into the room”) (123, 97, 178, 56, 340). By confiding in Ona (and the reader), each of the women carry their stories a little less alone.
(A note: There are men in the novel, yet Acevedo crafts them as peripheral. We see the role they play only through the stories of the women, and even then they aren’t the focus. (As the Washington Post notes: “Some readers may note that three of the Marte daughters were born in the 1950s during the 30-year dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, yet there is no specific reference to his tyranny, his notorious preying on campo girls or the measures families took to protect them.”) At the living wake, Samuel, the four sisters’ only brother, “worked his way to the side of the room. Not with his sisters and nieces, but alongside them, at least” (340-1). And this depiction is telling for the entire story: Just because the men are not the purpose of these women’s lives or stories, does not mean they cannot or should not be supportive.)
“Each one had departed [the Dominican Republic] in varying stages of womanhood, facing a country armed to harm them, and they with very few shields,” Ona says of the Marte women (293). The United States was not built to benefit everyone, especially immigrant women from non-European countries. Family Lore is not just about centering the expansiveness of womanhood on the page, but about how that intertwines with history, and preserving legacies that whitewashing attempts to erase. Just as Acevedo said to NPR, Family Lore explores who each of these women are as individuals and as a family, probing “who am I?” a question we all ask at some point in our lives. In the novel, that self is rooted in legacy and future.
“Each one had departed in varying stages of womanhood, facing a country armed to harm them, and they with very few shields”
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