Elizabeth Acevedo is a poet and an award-winning author of books for young adults. But in 2023, she published Family Lore, her first novel for adults.
The Iron Book Discussion Group will read and discuss Family Lore during the group’s next meeting in October 2025.
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BOOK DESCRIPTION
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.
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Copies of Family Lore can be picked up from the Book Discussion Shelf on our first floor, and it’s also available digitally as an ebook (through Hoopla) or an audiobook (through Hoopla or Overdrive/Libby).
An in-person discussion of Family Lore will be held at the library on Tuesday, October 14, at 7:00 PM. No registration is required, so please join us if you’d like to be part of the discussion.
Published on September 12, 2025.
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