Familia by Laura Rico

This was a The Community Reads book for my town, where there are unlimited electronic copies of the book for a period of time, and I was able to listen to it while I was doing (and am doing ) extensive PT after surgery, and I enjoyed it in a light fiction sort of genre. Here's the story: Gabby is an aspiring writer who lives in Brooklyn and works for the feature magazine Flux, where she and other staff members are offered the opportunity to take free familial DNA tests. Gabby’s charming boss, Max, hopes that some of the results will lead to a story of some sort. And they do: though Gabby insists that she is of Italian heritage, her DNA profile indicates European, African, and Taino ancestry. Gabby’s parents are deceased, so she cannot discuss the perplexing results with them; she’s also unnerved by her newfound DNA link to an older sister, Isabella, in Puerto Rico whose sister was kidnapped as a baby. She is so unnerved that even though she insists that it is a mistake, she ends up quitting her job and going to Puerto Rico to look into it further. The book shifts between Gabby and Isabella’s perspectives. Gabby was raised as an adored only child in New York, Gabby attended private school and traveled in Europe--she cannot imagine that her parents would kidnap a child and raise it as their own, and her birth certificate bears that out. In Puerto Rico, Isabella grew up with an alcoholic, heroin-addicted father; she witnessed her mother’s childbirth-related death and endured a violent sexual assault when she was fifteen. Now a talented artist who also works at a tourist shop, streetwise Isabella is thrilled by the possible discovery of a long-lost sibling. Together they untangle the truth.