I have mixed feelings about this book. Overall, I liked it – I thought both the story and the writing were compelling and I’m impressed with it as a debut. It’s my book club pick for April and I’m really excited to talk about it because I think there are a lot of interesting themes to discuss. My main complaint is that I didn’t like the religious elements of the story and I didn’t like the ending.

I can’t discuss the parts I didn’t like without getting into spoilers, so let’s talk about what I did like first. Familia is the story of Gabby DiMarco and Isabella Ruiz, two women with very different backgrounds, connected by blood. Gabby is a well-to-do woman in New York City whose parents have recently passed away and is trying to get her big break as a journalist. Isabella is a Puerto Rican woman who lost her mother in childbirth and her father’s subsequent depression and alcohol abuse resulted in the kidnapping of her infant sister, Marianna, 7 months later. This tragic event traumatizes Isabella for the rest of her life and even 25 years later, she is determined to find her sister. When Isabella and Gabby get a 50% DNA match on a gene website, Gabby is sure there’s a mistake, but flies to Puerto Rico in hopes of breaking an interesting story.

It’s obvious where the plot is going, but I enjoyed the journey. It’s a compelling narrative and I was really interested in all the themes the author wanted to explore. Isabella feels a deep sense of resentment for her sister because her birth resulted in the death of her mother and the breakdown of her family, but she also feels guilt over having wished her sister never existed at the exact moment she disappears. When they are reunited, her guilt morphs into jealousy at the easy life her sister had growing up in America in contrast to her traumatic childhood and youth. Gabby refuses to believe that she and Isabella could possibly be sisters, because to accept that fact would be to accept that her entire life and family was a lie. Plus it raises the age-old question of what really makes a family – is it the blood you share or the relationships and trust you’ve built. 

I thought these were all fascinating questions, particularly for Isabella, who I found a more compelling character, and I thought the author did a good job at exploring the internal conflict of these two women. Their relationship was believable to me. They have an emotional connection, but not in an overly cheesy way, and the experience brings them closer together, while still being realistically challenging for them. 

Overall, I liked the format. The author opts to break the story up between the present and the past. Isabella and Gabby do their own detective work to try and figure out what actually happened to Marianna, while at the same time we have flashbacks to a wider cast of characters that were responsible for Marianna’s disappearance. It turns the book into more of a literary mystery novel and it serves to keep the reader interested in the storyline. I think this could have also worked as pure literary fiction and delved a lot deeper into the emotional impact this would have on Isabella and Gabby, as well as to question the ethics and morality of Gabby’s upbringing. I think I probably would have preferred the latter, but recognize that it would be a much more challenging novel to write and think this was still impressive for a debut.

What I didn’t like was that the author bypasses any exploration of the ethics of Marianna’s kidnapping (by Gabby’s parents). To be fair, she does explore the idea that there are almost always grey areas in the law in these types of situations. Kidnapping is obviously wrong, but if the baby grows up to live a much more comfortable and privileged life, does that justify the means? How does Gabby rationalize the fact that her parents are both loving and caring people, while also being kidnappers? As a fact checker, I thought she would want to really delve into that narrative. To me, this was the most interesting theme of the novel and I wanted to consider the dichotomy of these two conflicting facts about her parents. But the story is written to conveniently bypass these challenging ideas, which I did think was a bit of a cop-out. To be fair, I may be holding the book to an unreasonably high standard. It was well-written and I was hopeful that the author would commit to some very tough themes.

So let’s talk about what I didn’t like (spoilers ahead!). First off, I didn’t like the religious aspect of the story. There were some really interesting ethical questions here, and I think the author used spiritual intervention to avoid tackling questions of morality. This was a 7-month old baby. It’s one thing to knowingly kidnap a baby with the intention to traffic it – that is a deeply sick crime. I felt it was another thing to opportunistically kidnap a baby and then decide to kill it. I feel that most people would have deep ethical problems when presented with this scenario, even Santiago (what kind of sick person is willing to kill their widowed brother’s daughter?). Because it wasn’t a premeditated kidnapping, I couldn’t rationalize any other acceptable course of action other than to return the baby to her parent. 

I felt like the author used the whole ‘weeping Madonna’ spectacle and Lucy and Mack’s infertility to try and convince the reader that giving away someone else’s baby was an acceptable course of action. I was glad that Mack realized that the whole idea was ludicrous, but I felt the whole “you must take the baby or Santiago will kill it anyways” was a cop-out. Likewise, getting Alberto’s permission to take the baby was the ultimate way to absolve Lucy and Mack of any wrong-doing. It’s a clean way to structure your novel and it removes the conflict for Gabby that her parents were both good and immoral people. From her perspective, all they did was adopt her unknowingly from an orphanage, which conveniently absolves her from having to rationalize that people we love can make both good and bad choices. It’s a feel-good way to tie up your novel, and that’s fine, I guess I just wanted to get into gritty questions of morality. 

At the very least, if you’re going to absolve Lucy and Mack of any wrong-doing, I thought Rico would at least confront the impacts of Alberto’s decision on both him and Isabella. I struggled to believe that he would willingly hand over his baby to an American couple he knew nothing about. In fact, none of the characters knew anything about Lucy or Mack aside from the fact that Lucy was desperate for a baby. They could have been terrible people. Did Gabby have a better life in America? Most likely… she definitely had more money and opportunity. But we also will never know how things might have been different if Marianna had been returned to her family.

Maybe if Marianna had been returned to her family, it would have been the wake-up call Alberto needed to get clean and take care of his family. He proves at the end that he’s capable of it (which I also found highly unbelievable, why would he randomly get clean after 25 years?), so maybe he would have redeemed himself if he hadn’t given up his youngest daughter. But what really rubbed me the wrong way was that the sisters never found out the truth! Isabella would be devastated to learn that her father willingly gave away her sister and then lied to her about it for 25 years. I felt like this theme really should have been addressed and it did a bit of a disservice to both women to keep it a secret. 

The thing is, I don’t think Lauren Rico wanted to explore those themes. I think Rico was more interested (based on the author’s note) in exploring themes of familial bonds and heritage. I think she wanted to tell a story of sisterhood and family reunion, without doing the work to explore the deep emotional impact of this event on each family member. Which made me question why she structured her book as more of a mystery novel. To be honest, the “how” of Marianna’s kidnapping wasn’t as interesting to me as the emotional impact it had on the two women as adults. I think I would honestly have been fine not knowing how Marianna ended up in the US and just exploring the Ruiz family roots and healing of trauma. I was surprised there was no exploration of the fact that Gabby has just gone from being White to being Latina, and what it would feel like to suddenly be thrust into a completely new culture that you feel you have no right to claim. There’s so much to unpack with these concepts and I was just left feeling a little disappointed. There were great ideas, but I feel like we only scratched the surface.

Some reviews by Puerto Ricans also discuss the idea that Rico only portrays the dark side of Puerto Rico. That Puerto Rico is filled with drugs and criminals, rather than showcasing some of the more vibrant parts of the island (I think this is done primarily through Isabella’s art). I think this ties in with my general comments about why the author chooses to focus on the crime rather than the aftermath. It promotes a white saviour narrative, so I can see how that would be insulting to locals and I wanted the author to do more emotional labour in breaking this down for her readers. 

This is a more minor complaint, but I have to mention one other scene that bothered me. The scene where Mateo randomly decides to leave Isabella after she gets in the fight with Gabby. This conflict didn’t fit the story and came out of nowhere. Isabella is going through so much emotional turmoil during this time and then all of a sudden her supposedly perfect husband is like “I can’t take this, you need to figure out who you are or I’m outta here!” She is literally trying to figure it out at this exact moment Mateo! Why don’t you buckle down and be there for her for a hot minute while she works through an extreme amount of trauma! She’s just found her sister – she’s been searching for her for 25 years and she’s now realizing that the search was a way of avoiding trauma and now that she’s found Marianna, she has to acknowledge that it doesn’t heal all her old wounds. 

Anyways, take my criticisms with a grain of salt. I have so many because this book made me think a lot. It’s maybe unfair to hold a debut author to such a high standard. I would definitely read her next book because I think she has a lot of promise and it was an engaging read. Props to any novel that can inspire me to dig deep and write this long of a review. I’m excited to see what else we unearth about this book in our book club discussion and whether it changes any of my opinions!