Family Lore is Elizabeth Acevedo's adult fiction debut. I have long been a fan of her YA novels in verse, so I was eager to read this ARC. I have hemmed and hawed about how to rate it, because I can name so many things Acevedo did brilliantly in this book and just as many aspects that did not work for me personally. 

Family Lore has a character list a mile long and is told from numerous perspectives. The story centers on a family from the Dominican Republic who have immigrated to New York. The sisters of the older generation are in their sixties and seventies, Matilde, Pastora, and Flor. Flor decides to plan a living wake for herself, and immediately the family is anxious because Flor has an ability to see people's deaths before they happen. 

Told in a combination of the present day and many, many flashbacks to the sisters' youth in the DR and in the US, parts of the book read like a connected short story collection. I found these flashback vignettes very powerful, but also hard to connect back to each individual character because the cast was so large and the stories had so many similarities. 

Acevedo also includes the perspective of Yadi and Ona, two daughters of the matriarchal sisters. Yadi's ex-boyfriend has recently been released from prison and Ona is struggling to conceive with her husband. I found both of their perspectives very relatable and easier to follow than the sisters. 

Overall, this book was denser and harder to follow than I thought necessary but the writing was beautiful. I wish it had the clean pacing of Acevedo's YA works. It felt so much longer and slower than I like, and I truly feel many readers will have trouble differentiating the cast of sisters like I did. So I will continue to read whatever she writes, and I hope that Acevedo's next adult release is even better. 

Thank you to NetGalley and Ecco publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.