Family Lore: A Novel

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.

ADD TO MY SHELVES

Recommend book

BUY THE BOOK

384 pages

Average rating: 6.16

125 RATINGS

7 REVIEWS

These clubs recently read this book...

RVA Literary League

The Social Book Club

This BrowneGirl Reads

DISCOVER MORE CLUBS

Community Reviews

Write a review...

Carla_is_Reading

Oct 24, 2024

8/10 stars

4.5 stars
I will be back with more complete thoughts....

joss94

Oct 03, 2024

6/10 stars

okay!! I love the story of the Family Lore but it was so difficult to give my 100% to this book maybe I'm not used to read with a lot of point of views.

KLN

Jun 29, 2024

8/10 stars

Rounded up from 3.5

Minic00

Jun 13, 2024

10/10 stars

This has one was so intriguing to read. The story is of a family of sisters who all had different gifts. The mom that the story focuses around has everyone up in arms because she wants to have a living wake. With no illness in sight, her family knows her gift is that of knowing how/when someone will die. This sets us up to dive into all of the characters, their thoughts on her impending wake, and their gifts. Coming from a large family with my mom being one of many sisters, this read had me grasping for each chapter.

TBGRbookclub

Dec 21, 2023

6/10 stars

Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo. Reviewed by TyaNeka Edwards. 🎁 What better way to end this year than reading Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo. This novel about family, sisters in particular, with its elements of magic is a such a moving tribute to the ties that bind. 🎁 The Marte sisters, Matilde, Flor, Pastora, and Camila, each posses some type of magic or innate sense about things and/or people. As they navigate their gifts, they also navigate their place in each other life. Told over a three day period, in multiple points of view, leading up to the living wake that Flor has planned for herself, we learn how each sister left the island of the Dominican Republic and made a life for themselves in New York. 🎁 Elizabeth Acevedo did not disappoint in her first foray outside of Young Adult fiction. This is novel is beautifully written and makes you feel an intimate connection with each sister, and their daughters. Family Lore, like her other novels, will go down as one of my favorite reads. ~ TyaNeka Edwards, moderator for This BrowneGirl Reads book club