The Curse of the Flores Women - Review

I received an audio copy from Brilliance Publishing via NetGalley. All reviews are my own.

For those who don't follow me on Instagram (@thelittlibrarian. Go see some pretty pictures and cartoonish voices), I recently shared my woes about losing a good chunk of my NetGalley audio downloads due to upgrading my phone to something better. NetGalley really needs to have the option to sync books and audio across all devices available, but that's neither here nor there. Guess what? I found one of the titles I lost, The Curse of the Flores Women by Angélica Lopes, on Kindle Unlimited WITH the audio pairing! Ohmigod, did I hurry up and add that to my digital library! The thrill of discovering it again was unparalleled. Set in Brazil, the story tells of womanhood, familial secrets, and the history behind a curse that lasted for seven generations.

"Eighteen-year-old Alice Ribeiro is constantly fighting—against the status quo, female oppression in Brazil, and even her own mother. But when a family veil is passed down to her, Alice is compelled to fight for the rights of all womankind while also uncovering the hidden history of the women in her family.

Seven generations ago, the small town of Bom Retiro shunned the Flores women because of a “curse” that rendered them unlucky in love. With no men on the horizon to take care of them, the women learned the art of lacemaking to build lives of their own. But their peace was soon threatened by forces beyond any woman’s control.

As Alice begins piecing together the tapestry that is her history, she discovers revelations about the past, connections to the present, and a resilience in her blood that will carry her toward the future her ancestors strove for."

As we know, I prefer to read books by audio these days, and I had the pleasure of listening to Dominique Franceschi narrate the story. It was a quick 8-hour and 12-minute listen, and Franceschi delivered the text flawlessly, making the listening experience a breeze.

TCOTFW is a duel timeline story between present-day 2010 and the past of 1918-1919. In the present, Alice Ribeiro is gifted a laced veil passed down to the Flores women, generation after generation, with a hidden message woven into the threads. Once she cracked the code, she sought out answers to figure out who the original lacemaker was and why she had a foreboding warning on her wedding veil. In the past, we follow Inês, who narrates the story, Cândida (her blind younger sister), their mother, Aunt Firmina, Victorina, and the best friend, Eugênie. They are the women who started their lacemaking business and the drama that unfolds with such a hobby. That seems a lot of people, but we will focus more on Inês and Eugênie.

What's good about the past perspective is that each character's view doesn't clash and confuse the main point of the tale. While Inês is the main narrator for the past, she talks heavily about helping her friend Eugênie get out of a loveless marriage. The added characters, such as Aunt Firmina, Victorina, etc., are the moving pieces that help put the story together. So, while there are a lot of notable characters to help move the story along, they don't have their own POV chapters in the book. That said, it seems as if the timeline jumps around a lot. But if you can, stick it out. It helped weave the story into a tight-knit stitch by the tale's end. While the present story is basically an interest in the past, the past is what sells the lore. Actually, the past story was so much better than the present. I wish we had focused more on that and gone away with the present timeline, which left me wanting more of the past narrative.

Because this book is semi-historical fiction, I like to do this new thing with my reading experience by researching the historical points of a story to see how well they add up. You'd be surprised how many small facts you store for those random trivia game nights in your brain. TCOTFW is historical, but it has a very broken timeline. Some of the information is real, while most is fictional or in the wrong timeline. You can look up the women's suffrage in Brazil in 1919 but don't expect to find much on these specific characters or even the leader of that particular faction. I appreciate the author giving a heads-up about her creative choices, as stated in the Author's Notes.

Some inconsistencies in the text made me slightly turn my head like a confused dog. While the story focuses on Inês telling the events of Eugênie, Eugênie is not a Flores and, therefore, not part of the "curse" that was bestowed upon them. But this book is about Eugênie's nightmare. Another thing is that the "curse" is not really a curse. The title is a bit of a catfish there. You won't get the spooktacular feels like Leopoldo Gout's Piñata but more of V. Castro's The Haunting of Alejandra. Go in, knowing that the lore of the curse is not the driving factor of the story.

Overall, I rated this book 3-stars. It's not what I expected, but it was still a good background story. If you have KU, I suggest grabbing it now! Oh, and take that NetGalley!

The Curse of the Flores Women is available now!

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