I woke up thinking about the book after finishing it yesterday. That's always a good sign when a book stays with me. Ona is the first person narrator and her project is collecting her family's story.
Flor, Ona's mother, has the gift of dreaming of people's deaths. She decides to host a living wake for herself and this event is the center happening of this story which jumps in time and between people to delve into the lives and relationships of the Marte sisters, mother, and two of their daughters.
The family is from the Dominican Republic and the members of which ended up in New York City.
There's magical realism here and a deep exploration of family dynamics, relationships, and love. ( )

This novel with elements of magical realism jumps back and forth in time, is centered on the Marte family, and is set between New York City and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The sisters at the heart of this novel have special abilities: One (Flor) has dreams that tell her when someone is going to die; one can tell when people are not being truthful, and one is an accomplished herbalist. Flor decides to gather her family for a living wake for herself and her loved ones assume that she is dying, although she refuses to confirm this speculation. However, Flor refuses to confirm this to anyone, even her own sisters, one of the many secrets at play in the dramatic family story there is plenty of drama simmering under the surface of the family. While I found the story engaging, parts of it dragged for me and because of the large cast of characters, I lost track a few times. Nevertheless, the writing is lyrical and powerful, and I plan to read more of Ms. Acevedo’s books. ( )

Flor, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, has always had a gift of foreseeing and knowing death. So when she calls together her family for an all out reunion/living wake, they suspect she has had a vision about one of them, but who?

Flor has four daughters, and each of them (even the oldest who doesn’t believe she has a gift) has a magical power, although they all vary. The most intriguing to me was Ona with her magical vagina that nevertheless could not provide the child she desperately wanted.

This is a lovely web of family relationships, but like all webs is very complicated. There are a large number of characters over several generations and also a number of phrases specific to the Dominican Republic that I had to look up, especially prominent in the stories Flor tells of her DR childhood. Have you heard the exclamation “!Fuacata!’ ? Not quite what I guessed it to mean, but much more. How about the Taino?

I’m glad I read it, but this first adult novel didn’t quite move me the way Ms Acevedo’s YA books have done. ( )

fiction, multigenerational Dominican-American family chisme and secrets

In a family where the women often have unexplained magical talents, middle sister Flor (who can sometimes foresee deaths) calls everyone together for her own living wake; Flor's daughter Ona (who studies history/cultural anthropology and who has what she calls an "alpha vagina") interviews and collects family lore from everyone in the weeks before the event. ( )

A "table of principal persons" precedes the story, and it's useful at first to understand each character, their special powers, and how they're connected: the four sisters (Matilde, Flor, Pastora, y Camila), Flor's daughter Ona and Pastora's daughter Yadi, and assorted husbands and boyfriends. The book has two structures: a countdown to the date when Flor has planned a "living wake" for herself, and an interview style, in which anthropologist Ona speaks with her tías and prises out their stories of life in the Dominican Republic and in New York. All principal characters accept their own and their family members' unique gifts: Flor foretells death in dreams, Pastora reads people's truths, etc.

See also: Dominicana by Angie Cruz

Quotes

It is my mother I want to ask about life and its disappointments. How do you learn to live with what will not be?How do you console yourself with the life that you have when the humans you love most are hopeful for more than you? (Ona, 105-106)

How could I explain? I'd left young because I had to. Because this woman who wanted to protect me so much had let her care braid itself into a vise around my throat. (Ona, 146)

Before I ever understood love, I only knew safety... (Pastora, 184)

"You always did care more about what other people considered relevant than what you considered urgent." (Soraya to Ona, 197)

She did not have any more stories for her daughter, but she had a million things still left to say. (Flor, 204)

This life required so many choices. So many little and big choices to plot to the next moment, and who knew if any of it mattered? They were all each other's spectacle and then they died. (Flor, 207)

Somehow, the life of a girl on the island [DR] was worth less than the reputation of a man she was disinterested in. (Camila, 240)

"Oh, I may not know much about living my own life, but I'm smart for others. And I know the heart is a burial ground for memories that shame and hurt. You can visit and place flowers there and make it a tomb. Or let those things act as fertilizer and pay no homage." (Matilde to Yadi, 351) ( )