Helia's Reviews > Familia

This is a book with a very promising premise, and a very heart-warming and emotional Author’s Note strategically placed as the opening chapter, completely derailed by a very weak execution.

It starts strong with an interesting concept: What would you do if a genealogy test you casually took for a work project rocked your world by claiming that not only your ethnicity is not what you were raised to believe, but also you have a sister you knew nothing about and a biological family you had never heard of in another part of the world? I was immediately intrigued as I could see right away the potential for this story to take me on an emotional rollercoaster.

Unfortunately, it took me nowhere. Didn’t take me on any rollercoasters; frankly didn’t take me to Puerto Rico either… (More on this later).

This book is written by a first-time author, and it definitely shows. It’s littered with repetitive dialogue and very underdeveloped characters. The story had a lot of very heavy themes, including drug use, alcoholism, gang violence, murder, kidnapping, loss of a parent at a young age, child neglect, rape, poverty, social injustice, infertility and of course at the center of it, a hell of an identity crisis… I mean you name it; you could find it here. However, sadly the author takes all these very heavy and potentially emotional themes and writes something that doesn’t even really touch the surface, let alone delve deep. The story read like YA to me, with two main characters that were written like teenagers, especially Gabby. The two sisters are meant to be age 30 (Isabella) and 25 (Gabby) and both have supposedly gone through life events that would make anyone grow up real fast. Isabella has gone through literally everything a difficult life could throw at a person… And Gabby, well she has zero family. Both parents have died (although we were never told how or why?), and she has no siblings, no aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. No one. (again, we are not told how so?!).

And there lies my biggest problem with the book. The tone was all wrong. It was so light and breezy and “causal” that it didn’t make any sense for the serious premise. The writing was juvenile. There were so many pointless meaningless dialogues, so much “filler”. It was an only 320-page book that was still 100 pages too long.

Most of the characters were not believable to me, specially Gabby. She’s meant to be a 25-year-old New Yorker, from a middle class family. As the only child of a loving couple, she lives mortgage free in her Brooklyn apartment; she was taken to Paris for her 16th birthday; her bff was flown in too as a cute little surprise… She quits her job when she doesn’t like the way management treats her; she buys what appears to be a one-way ticket to Puerto Rico, and while there she appears to be living large (for no reason whatsoever!) and staying in luxury hotel suites larger than average people’s homes; and yet, if you think this 25-year-old globetrotter girl, raised in the melting pot of the world, has ever tasted or heard of empanadas you’d be sadly mistaken. If you think she knows what a Quinceañera entails, you’d also be mistaken.

What’s worse is that this is a woman who’s completely floored by the idea that she may not be who she thought she was. But if you think she ever thought to ask her parents what happened to her mom’s pregnancy pictures, what happened to any photos of her or her parents in the hospital after she was born, where is any sign/memento of her during the first few months of her life, you’d again be mistaken.

In general, I was expecting a character driven story that explores the unbelievable and lasting pain of loss, whether it is loss of family (your mother, your baby sister, a loving father, your innocence, your hopes and dreams) or it’s the loss of your identity and your reality, and then explores the long and windy road to healing from those blows. But it didn’t really do much of that. At least it attempted to take a stab at expressing Isabella’s pain, but it didn’t really tell us a single thing about Gabby’s pain. And don’t get me started on the ending of this book. Don’t get me started on the road to redemption and healing... Because it really pissed me off.

Major spoilers ahead:

Isabella’s entire life is defined not only by the loss of her mom when she’s only 5 years old, and subsequently the disappearance of her baby sister, but also by the constant neglect she experienced from her deadbeat father, Alberto, who was a drug addict and an alcoholic. A man who was never there for her daughter, and therefore forced her daughter to grow up alone and fast, fend for herself, and even take care of him. This man is a source of embarrassment and heartbreak for her daughter, and their complex relationship and the emotional trauma she experienced by feeling completely alone in this world was what I wanted the story to explore more.

And yet, the moment the long lost sister finally arrives wanting to meet Alberto, we find him to be, sober, well dressed, warm, kind, and he even has a well-used bible on the coffee table!!! This is the same man who didn’t show up to home for his child’s 15th birthday and then that child went on the streets to drown her sorrows in her art, and was violently raped… THIS is that man, but I digress, let’s get back to the meeting Alberto scene: Not only his house is clean, his grocery is purchased, his coffee is strong and warm, his bible is well read, but oh he also speaks English wonderfully… Why? Because in his 50s, he decided to quit decades of substance and alcohol use and then you know also learn perfect English?

And then the 3 of them hold hands, literally!!!, and there is electricity flowing through their bodies, and the universe tilts on its axis, and they know they belong to each other, (because of course NATURE wins, nurture be damned) and then… what road to redemption? What healing? We are there! All is forgiven. All is forgotten! Let’s all sing Kumbaya! (And let’s not worry about the small detail of the dad seemingly having sobered up but still standing there, lying to both daughters by withholding KEY information, and an absolutely life changing decision that was made by him impacting every moment of their whole lives!)

This was not just unrealistic, this was a slap in the face of Isabella, the girl who never had a sober father, the girl whose heart was broken every day for 20+ years. But do we explore this? Of course not! Because exploring difficult topics is not the author’s forte. And sadly not the point of this book either. Instead, the point of this book was solving the mystery of “whatever happened to baby Marianna?” except we know what happened to her; we know all was well with her, and she grew up happily ever after. We’ve known all along. So as a reader, the mystery didn’t particularly interest me, because not much was riding on it.

There was a small “twist” at the end of the story, but for me to have cared, I needed to have been deeply invested in the characters. I needed to not only care about the two sisters, but also the other characters including the two Puerto Rican police officers involved in the case, but the story hadn’t been written well enough for me to care a whole lot… about anyone really.

I really wanted the story to sit with the turn of events. With the lies that were told, the crimes that were committed, the life changing decisions a bunch of adults made for 2 children, and the conviction with which they stuck to their lies to the very end. I wanted the story to explain the gray area we landed in, where we realize nobody is ever going to come clean to Isabella and Gabby. They’re not going to tell them what they really did and why. They’re not going to look in Isabella’s eyes as she finds out while she spent her whole life searching for her sister, the people nearest to her continued to watch her flail around and didn’t do a thing to put her out of her misery. How many times did Gabby quote Shakespeare that “Truth Will Out”? Well, apparently not, Willy, my boy! But if you think we are going to explore what the burden of lies does to men and women who chose to tell those lies and break a girl’s heart for 20+ years, then you’re expecting the kind of depth and emotional weight that the author is not prepared to offer.

Instead Lauren Rico takes the easy way out to absolve Gabby’s American parents, Alberto, the cop, and really everyone involved, conveniently with one easy copout of an explanation that “if the baby stayed in Puerto Rico she would have been killed” and may I add nonsensically, by her own uncle! Ummm… make it make sense.

My final comment is about the story unfolding in Puerto Rico. I was intrigued by that too. I’ve never been. I wanted the book to take me there. I thought I’d learn something about its culture and history. I thought surely the author as a descendant of Puerto Ricans will show me the true soul of the country. Sadly, I can’t say I learned anything. In fact, I'm sorry to say if you had replaced the word “Puerto Rico” with Mexico or Panama or even Brazil, I don’t think anything would have changed at all. I found that to be incredibly disappointing. And what a complete wasted opportunity!

I have a lot more to say, but I think I’ll leave it at this. I had ranked this book as 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3, when I started this review. But in the process of writing this, I’ve realized it needs a round down, not up, and if I don’t stop now, and ask any more questions (e.g. What on earth happened to Franny? Or what was the point of Max being hot and Gabby being sort of in-lust with him?), I’m afraid I might end up with a one-star rating!