In 2019, the poet Elizabeth Acevedo became the first writer of colour to win the Carnegie medal for her debut young adult novel in verse, The Poet X, and was shortlisted again in 2021 for Clap When You Land, both novels exploring the lives of teenage girls coming of age in a Dominican-American community. Now, in her first novel for adults, she expands these themes into an exuberant, polyphonic story of one family’s reckoning with their past.
Flor Marte – the second eldest of four Dominican sisters now living in New York – has always had “an ear for the gossip of death”: whenever she dreams of her teeth shattering, a death follows soon after. So when, at 70, Flor announces plans to host her own “living wake”, her three sisters, her daughter Ona (who narrates the book), and her niece Yadi fear that she must have foreseen the worst. The book spans the three days of preparation for the wake, during which Ona’s narrative moves chapter by chapter between the six women as they each grapple with their unresolved questions: bad husbands, infertility, desire, and the dual lives and conflicting loyalties of first- and second-generation immigrants.
“My family comes from magic,” Ona says, but she is an anthropologist, and narrates her family history with a professional eye, adding background notes in parentheses; occasional paragraphs are indented or given line breaks like poems, while the dialogue is peppered with Spanish phrases, echoing the ways in which the women think and feel in two distinct idioms. Acevedo’s background in spoken-word poetry shines through in the energy and lyricism of her prose: “A myth for creation, a myth for death, a myth of a mother, a myth of a clothes hanger I dress with all the things you instilled, and all the things you barred behind your teeth.” But the novel’s greatest triumph is in the warmth of her portrayal of these women, their strength and stubbornness, and the inseparability of love and grief.
Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
