The Mango Tree : A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Eater 's Best Food Books to Read This Spring

This "witty, humorous, and heartfelt" (Cinelle Barnes) memoir navigates the tangled branches of Annabelle Tometich's life, from growing up in Florida as the child of a Filipino mother and a deceased white father to her adult life as a med-school-reject-turned-food-critic.

When journalist Annabelle Tometich picks up the phone one June morning, she isn't expecting a collect call from an inmate at the Lee County Jail. And when she accepts, she certainly isn't prepared to hear her mother's voice on the other end of the line. However, explaining the situation to her younger siblings afterwards was easy; all she had to say was, "Mom shot at some guy. He was messing with her mangoes." They immediately understood. Answering the questions of the breaking-news reporter--at the same newspaper where Annabelle worked as a restaurant critic--proved more difficult. Annabelle decided to go with a variation of the truth: it was complicated.

So begins The Mango Tree , a poignant and deceptively entertaining memoir of growing up as a mixed-race Filipina "nobody" in suburban Florida as Annabelle traces the roots of her upbringing--all the while reckoning with her erratic father's untimely death in a Fort Myers motel, her fiery mother's bitter yearning for the country she left behind, and her own journey in the pursuit of belonging.

With clear-eyed compassion and piercing honesty, The Mango Tree is a family saga that navigates the tangled branches of Annabelle's life, from her childhood days in an overflowing house flooded by balikbayan boxes, vegetation, and juicy mangoes, to her winding path from medical school hopeful to restaurant critic. It is a love letter to her fellow Filipino Americans, her lost younger self, and the beloved fruit tree at the heart of her family. But above all, it is an ode to Annabelle's hot-blooded, whip-smart mother Josefina, a woman who made a life and a home of her own, and without whom Annabelle would not have herself.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• The Pit (1)
• Part I The Seed (9)
• Chapter 1 Fort Myers (11)
• Chapter 2 Caloosahatchee (18)
• Chapter 3 Rituals (20)
• Chapter 4 Heartbeats (29)
• Chapter 5 Orange Grove Boulevard (36)
• Chapter 6 Pine Island (47)
• Chapter 7 McGregor (52)
• Chapter 8 The Commode (60)
• Chapter 9 The Seedling (67)
• Chapter 10 The Skunk Ape and the Mountain (72)
• Chapter 11 The Backyard (77)
• Chapter 12 Unleashed (83)
• Chapter 13 Wite-Out (89)
• Part II The Roots (99)
• Chapter 14 Elementary (101)
• Chapter 15 Kendall (104)
• Chapter 16 Cape Coral (113)
• Chapter 17 How to Clean a Room (118)
• Chapter 18 The Bike Ride (124)
• Chapter 19 Repetition (137)
• Chapter 20 Manila (142)
• Chapter 21 The Real Manila (163)
• Chapter 22 Going Home (169)
• Chapter 23 The Promise (173)
• Part III The Trunk (187)
• Chapter 24 The Eldest Mango (189)
• Chapter 25 Car Rides (198)
• Chapter 26 Open Heart (207)
• Chapter 27 Gainesville (215)
• Chapter 28 The Jungle (229)
• Chapter 29 Square One (243)
• Chapter 30 The C-Team (251)
• Chapter 31 The Paper (260)
• Chapter 32 Shit (271)
• Chapter 33 The Shot (280)
• Chapter 34 A Legend Is Born (293)
• The Branches (301)
• Acknowledgments (307)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Restaurant critic Tometich's witty, open-hearted debut recounts growing up in a mixed Filipino-American household in the Sunshine State. She begins in a Florida courtroom circa 2015: "Rows of orange people sit handcuffed," she writes, " one of them is my mother." Josefina, who immigrated from the Philippines to work as a nurse, has been arrested for shooting at a man she claims was stealing from her mango tree; none of her three adult children are surprised. Though all the ingredients are in place for the "most Florida of Oh, Florida stories," Tometich instead shifts gears to unfurl a complex coming-of-age chronicle set in a household buffeted by marital strife. At the center is Josefina, who married the white ne'er-do-well son of well-off Northeasterners. Tometich describes her parents' harrowing fights and the moments of refuge she found with her paternal grandmother. Amid it all, Tometich yearned for her family to be "normal," before eventually learning to embrace the abnormalities that "make us less vanilla and... more tangy green mango dipped in bagoong." Tometich writes with awe and humor about her irascible mother, who provided her children with a middle-class upbringing, while never underplaying the emotional toll extracted along the way. It's a moving account of coming to terms with the forces--good and bad--that shape a person. Agent: Kayla Lightner, Ayesha Pande Literary. (Apr.)

Booklist Review

The Mango Tree is a candid account of half-Filipino, half-Yugoslavian Annabelle Tometich's coming-of-age in Fort Myers, Florida, and her love-hate relationship with her mother. The book starts in 2015 with a court hearing involving the author's irrepressible Filipino mother, who unapologetically fired a BB gun on fleeing perps who stole some mangoes from her backyard. The author, the eldest of three siblings, mentions that the mango tree felt like her mother's fourth child. Tometich's narration, interspersed with sardonic bite, feels a little clunky, switching time frames and subject matter at a frenetic pace. Tometich's life is filled with frustrations and she frequently asserts that she is a nobody, even though, with her mom working as an ICU nurse, the family lived a comfortable life, and Tometich had strong family support from Filipino relatives who stayed with them (Tometich's Yugoslavian dad died when she was nine). An American-born teenager living with an immigrant tiger mom--readers have seen this before as familiar fodder in family relationship dramas, especially in households with Asian matriarchs.

Kirkus Book Review

A food writer's account of her mother and her influence. Tometich opens with the extreme yet amusing lengths that her mother, a Filipino immigrant, has gone to in order to protect the fruit of her beloved mango trees. That story serves as an entrée into the more general volatility and stubbornness of the author's mother, who arrived in the U.S. from Manila as a nurse and married the only child of a well-to-do New England family. Her immigrant determination clashed with his lack of direction and urgency, creating a childhood for Tometich and her siblings that was marked by the storms of violent tempers. One might expect the memoir of a food writer to discuss how either food or writing were cornerstone elements of her youth, reprieves from chaos and grief. But the sense that Tometich gives of having almost fallen into her career (in which she has enjoyed a fair amount of success) as a restaurant critic belies the skill with narrative and language that she displays. Her showing is stronger than her telling; with power and resonance, the author recalls vivid and visceral details that gave contour to her childhood--some perhaps expected in the narrative of a first-generation American, others more severe and startling. As the writer ages, starts her own family, and builds the distance and perspective required to contextualize her mother's story and character, certain passages seem to rush to a tidy conclusion, with almost cliché reflections. However, these attempts at a clean resolution counterbalance a text that, on the whole, leans into the struggles of both mother and daughter, without forcing peace between or within either of them. Tometich's measured tenderness and understanding grant complexity and authenticity to a story about finding one's identity and owning its source. A well-paced, nuanced memoir by a practiced storyteller. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.