The Mango Tree
A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The Washington Post's Best Books of 2024
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
