sisters

Family Lore, by Elizabeth Acevedo

by

Seventy-year-old Flor decides to throw herself a living wake, alarming her three sisters because they know Flor has a special gift: she can predict when someone will die. They, too, have special gifts: Pastora can tell whether or not someone is telling the truth, and Camila, the youngest, creates herbal tonics and medicines that always heal.

The occasional narrator, Flor’s daughter Ona, has a magical vagina, and Pastora’s daughter Yadi has a mystical relationship with limes. The oldest of the four sisters, Matilde, doesn’t have a magical gift, but her salsa moves are beyond brilliant, and she loves deeply and loyally.

The first adult book by children’s author Acevedo weaves together the stories of these six women with a sure touch. This enchanted tale moves between New York and Santa Domingo, slipping through time, interleaving English with bits of Spanish. The Spanish was not a problem for me, though I don’t speak the language, because the context clues were sufficient.

Reminding me of early Isabelle Allende, like The House of Spirits, the novel delivers a feast. Little by little, Acevedo fills in the lives of these women, their care for each other tugging against their push for independence.

Normally I struggle with multiple narrators and time jumps, but here I didn’t have any trouble keeping the characters and timelines straight. However I did look back at the list of characters at the front of the book for about the first quarter of the book, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I’d be listening to the audiobook. Also, I wouldn’t have had the formatting that signaled time jumps, so I might have gotten confused

Some of the members of my book club did indeed find the book confusing. They also struggled to get into the characters, perhaps because of the difficulty of tracking so many characters.

One member of my book club noted that she was surprised by what the sisters didn’t know about each other, but secrets within a family are not that uncommon. And actually for a couple of us, seeing the minute changes in their relationships was part of what we enjoyed about the book.

I found the writing joyous and fresh. For example, introducing the story of Flor and her husband: “Pedro had approached her like a strong breeze through an open doorway, unexpected, soft on the skin even if it did scatter a few things to the ground.” 318

When the sisters turn to Yadi, Pastora’s daughter, to look up information on the internet: “The younger generation brought new ways of doing things, these new inventions, and the hermanas touched their fingers to gadgets, or their tongues to new words, and sewed the technology into the fabric of their lives the way one embroiders lace.” 274

I was also intrigued by the way the women went back and forth between New York and Santa Domingo, each city giving them something the other couldn’t. So different from the usual emigrant narrative of longing to return home and not being able to, or of not wanting to return ever. I also saw this in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Discussing this idea sent my book club into the history of the Dominican Republic to look at political changes in that country and whether they related to the waves of immigration.

The relationship between these women—and they with their men—are nothing like what I’ve experienced. Well, now I have, thanks to Acevedo. If you want to understand what a family can be, this is the book for you.

Sisters, sisters! What novel can you recommend about sisters?

Magic Hour, by Kristin Hannah

by

9780345522184-1030877264

Successful LA psychiatrist Julia Cates is watching her career crumble. A suit against her brought by the families of victims of one of her patients has created a media frenzy that asserts, if not her guilt, then at least her incompetence. At the same time, her sister Ellie, police chief in tiny Rain Valley on the outskirts of the Olympic National Forest in Washington, faces a challenge unlike any that has come her way before.

The two sisters are opposites: Julia the smart one who never fit in and left Rain Valley after high school; Ellie the beautiful one, adored by her father and popular in school, who stayed, taking her uncle’s place as chief. They are alike in one way, though: unsuccessful in love. Ellie, whose friend Peanut says suffers from “the curse of the small-town beauty queen,” has burned through two marriages, while Julia’s all or nothing approach to love has left her bruised, alone, and suspicious of men who are too handsome for their own good.

When an emergency call takes Ellie to the park in the small center of town, she finds a ragged child in a tree clutching a wolf pup and refusing to come down. She doesn’t seem to understand Ellie’s words and only growls or howls in response. Eventually lured down with food and sedated, the girl is found to be severely dehydrated and undernourished. The scars on her body indicate beatings and—worst of all—ligature marks around her ankles.

Ellie calls on her sister, not recognising that the “wolf girl” will generate her own media frenzy that will only add to Julia’s problems. The psychiatrist’s patient list has evaporated, so there’s nothing keeping her in LA. However, returning to a town where she never felt at home and must now see her as the failure the rest of the world believes her to be is a challenge in itself.

Their parents now dead, the two sisters must renegotiate their relationship while trying to help the nameless, terrified girl who doesn’t seem to know what a toilet or a bed are and has been separated from her only friend, the wolf cub. They must navigate not only the media but also the small-town gossips and turn them into assets in their search for the girl’s family. Working with the possibly feral child exposes their own weaknesses, strengths, and secrets.

Being set in a small town the world has left behind since the logging has ended, whose inhabitants stubbornly refuse to give up, provides a fitting frame for the story. Living now in a small town myself has made me appreciate the webs of interaction that are different from those in a city.

As with all of Hannah’s books that I’ve read, this book is almost impossible to put down. The emotions that roil the action are true to life and so carefully orchestrated that they engage the reader without becoming either exhausting or melodramatic.

I’ve heard of writers charting the levels of suspense in their novels during the revision phase. Hannah’s masterful work makes me consider charting the emotional temperature of my stories. After a little searching, I’ve found that Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers have a writing craft book about doing just that: The Bestseller Code. Analysing data, they found, among other things, that high-performing books have a similar pattern of emotional highs and lows. I guess it’s no surprise that Magic Hour seems to fit that pattern.

The aspects of the story that most interested me are the wild child’s introduction to society, the relationship between the sisters, and their relationship with the past. I was less interested in the rather predictable romance aspect of the story, but that could also be due to my personal preferences when it comes to books.

This story and its well-drawn characters will stay with me for a long time. It has added more nuance to my thoughts about nature and society. It has made me think more about what we do with our past, how much we let it influence our present. Most of all, it took me in and wouldn’t let me go until the end.

Do you have a favorite Kristin Hannah novel?