National Book Award winner Elizabeth Acevedo's first adult novel, Flor's Farewell is a unique and vivid story of a Dominican family told through the voices of its women.
Flor Marte has a gift: she can predict death. So when she decides to hold a funeral for herself—a party to gather family and friends and celebrate her long life—her sisters are taken by surprise. Did Flor predict her own death? Someone else's death? Is there some other motivation behind this? She, however, refuses to give any further explanation to her sisters Matilde, Pastora, and Camila.
It turns out that Flor isn't the only one in the family keeping secrets. Matilde has tried for decades to ignore her husband's infidelities, but now she finds herself forced to deal with the state of her marriage. Pastora, on the other hand, is the more reserved sister, but Flor's funeral motivates her to try to resolve Matilde's relationship once and for all. And the youngest, Camila, normally overlooked by her sisters, decides that this will no longer be her status in the family.
Meanwhile, the younger generation of Martes faces their own dilemmas: Yadi has to take care of the funeral catering while also dealing with the return of an ex-boyfriend who had been arrested when they were both teenagers; and her cousin Ona, married for years, wants to have a baby at all costs and needs to decide whether it's worth moving forward—whether with her plans for motherhood or with her professional life as an anthropologist, which seems to have lost its luster.
Over the days leading up to the funeral, Flor's Farewell follows the lives of each of the Marte family members, interweaving past and present, Santo Domingo and New York. Written in Elizabeth Acevedo's unique and incandescent voice, this book is a vivid portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces, and the story of a family that must learn to cope with what lies ahead.
“There is no writer in the world capable of transforming the pages of a book into a home with distinct rooms of emotions as Elizabeth Acevedo does.” – Kiese Laymon
“A grand, multigenerational story... Readers, make room on your bookshelves for this powerful new voice with an old soul.” – Julia Alvarez
"There's so much love in this wise, funny, and original novel. Above all, it's a unique contribution to the writings of the Dominican diaspora." – Naima Coster
