Back in 2009, when then spoken-word poet Elizabeth Acevedo was an undergrad and preparing for her senior honors thesis, she was walking over a bridge in the Bronx in New York City when a vision of her mother and her mother’s eight sisters popped into her head.

“Each one of them has attributes and quirks and contradictions that make them perfect fodder for an unputdownable story,” she remembers thinking. “One day I will write a story in vignettes about my mother’s sisters.”

Flash forward 14 years, and that vision has become a reality. In a sprawling, meandering narrative that jumps back and forth in time between the Dominican Republic’s capital city of Santo Domingo and New York City, “Family Lore” has hints of magical realism and is told from alternating perspectives. Acevedo’s much anticipated first novel for adults presents a vibrant but dizzying mosaic of two generations of women whose love for and loyalty to each other has proven to be a salve during tough times.

The novel begins with a promising setup. Flor, the second eldest Marte sister and the one whose dreams foretell others’ deaths, is in the throes of throwing herself a living wake. (Whether she’s the one who is actually at death’s door isn’t revealed until the very end, though it’s implied.) In the weeks and then days leading up to the big event, we are introduced to other influential women in Flor’s life, mainly her sisters Matilde, Pastora and Camila; Flor’s daughter, Ona; and Pastora’s daughter, Yadi.

Unfortunately, not every character is given her due.

On one end of the spectrum, the emotionally complex passages devoted to Yadi’s complicated feelings for Ant, a childhood beau who has just been released from prison after 18 years, or the sections describing the decades-long saga between childless eldest sister Matilde and her husband, Rafa, who “wasn’t a man who could make do with the attention of only one woman,” practically pop off the page. With each vivid description of Matilde’s vivacious moves in dance class, in dance competitions and at clubs over the years, for example, we better understand how devastating it felt for her to give up her dream of becoming a professional dancer in favor of staying home and darning her philandering husband’s socks. (Early in the courtship, the advice of Matilde’s strict mother is telling: “This life is too long to spend it alone. Even a no-good-man is a man, and that’s good enough.”)

In contrast, some of the other characters’ backstories and their supernatural gifts are at best slightly underdeveloped and, at worst, inexplicably glossed over. For example, Camila, whose marriage to a wealthy, possibly gay socialite consisted of providing “each other the fronts they needed to escape the threats that had been tightening around their throats before they’d met,” is the focus of only one chapter compared to Matilde’s starring role in eight and Flor’s in 11. (Just because Camila is perceived as “the forgotten sister” by the rest of her family doesn’t mean readers won’t want to know more about her.)

What’s more, the structure of “Family Lore” can be a head-scratcher at times, even with the Tolstoy-esque character map at the beginning. Frequent intra-chapter flashbacks to the sisters’ adolescence in the Dominican Republic, coupled with seemingly random interview transcripts between Ona and the other characters or parenthetical asides about tangential topics like the origins of one of the oldest gangs in Dominican culture, make figuring out what’s going on at any given time a challenge.

Still, the bones of inspiration are there. Acevedo eloquently captures the rich tenor of the Dominican American experience, both in “Family Lore” and in her books for young adults. (“The Poet X,” a truly on fire novel-in-verse about a Dominican American teen who discovers her true self and the power of language through spoken word, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2018 and is not to be missed, even if you’re an adult.)

As she writes in the introduction, “Writing a novel, for me, is like writing this letter to you. I search through the bins of happenstance and vernacular and human interactions and I pull at the threads that make me curious or pained or joyous. … And then I weave. And weave. And weave again. I don’t worry aboutwhatI’m making. I preoccupy myself only with: Is this true?”

Alexis Burling is a freelance writer.