Review: "The Mango Tree" by Annabelle Tometich

The Mango Tree by Annabelle Tometich
Published April 2024 via Little, Brown and Company
★★★★

Tometich was not prepared to get a call from her mother telling her that her mother was in jail for shooting at someone who had raided her mango tree—but neither was Tometich entirely surprised. When a person has lost so much, what’s a tree? When a person has lost so much, how can they lose anything more? (loc. 5145*)

The mango-tree misadventures bookend the story, but the bulk of the material is about what came before: Tometich’s upbringing in Florida with her American father and Filipina mother, and her mother’s story more generally. Because: it was in many ways not an easy upbringing for Tometich, but neither was it an easy life for her mother.

When I think of my mother, I don’t see her, I feel her. She’s a stake driven deep into the ground, the kind you see tethering newly planted trees and disaster tarps in place. She has kept our family from toppling sideways while punching a hole clean through the middle. (loc. 136)

If Tometich can’t quite reconcile her two understandings of her mother—one, as someone who slowly unraveled over time; two, as someone who won every academic award possible and thrived on a challenge and systematically set out to ensure that both she and her family members had as many advantages as she could give them—it’s because, for all that the things aren’t mutually exclusive, they’re just…still hard to reconcile.

The story is studded with fleshy, sun-ripened mangoes, not just from the tree at the center of Tometich’s mother’s court case but as something more broadly symbolic. A mango farm isn’t like the apple orchards up north, writes Tometich, or even the citrus groves that speckle the Sunshine State’s inland areas. Mango trees need room to breathe. They require space. If you plant them too close together, the humid air gets caught in their overlapped branches and the trees go soggy with rot. Too close together and their growth will be stunted, the trees will never reach their full potential. (loc. 832) Mangoes that her mother cherishes, mangoes that Tometich’s white acquaintances experience as more nuisance than treat, mangoes that come to represent the injustice of being forced to be a perpetual outsider in your home.

I love memoir for letting me into lives and experiences unlike my own, and The Mango Tree does that in more ways than one. 3.5 stars, and it will be interesting to see the discussion around this one.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.