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A Good Morning America Book Club Pick
by Elizabeth Acevedo
From National Book Award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo comes the story of one Dominican American family told through the voices of its women.
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.
"Acevedo is brilliant at portraying the women's love and loyalty for one another. The author's fans will eat this up." —Publishers Weekly
"A juicy novel of sisterhood, resilience, and magic... . Acevedo's novel starring a spunky narrator will enchant both fans and new readers." —Booklist
"Only Elizabeth Acevedo could make an epic feel so intimate, so perfectly crafted and tightly drawn. Family Lore is a devastating exploration of the liveliness of the Marte women. No writer on earth transforms a page into a home with distinct emotional chambers like Acevedo, and her she does it with language that is equally lush and lacerating. This is how stories should be made." —Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy
"There's deep magic not only among the close-knit Marte sisters and their offspring, but on every page of Family Lore. This book is at turns tender, intense, sensual, and hilarious—I couldn't get enough. Elizabeth Acevedo's precise, intricate prose mesmerizes, surprises, and delights. This is a family saga to be read with your whole heart and soul." —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
This information about Family Lore was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elizabeth Acevedo is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of With the Fire on High―which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal―and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus Prize finalist. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem and Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer's Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC, with her family.
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