Elena, the first scientifically confirmed virgin birth, acquires the ability to heal by touch at age 16, the same year that people start disappearing in beams of light, causing her to wonder if she is bringing about the Apocalypse.
During the school day, Lance García looks like a typical fourth-grader at Oakland Elementary School. But after school, dressed in disguise black jacket, black baseball cap and dark, cool sunglasses with tiny, rectangular mirrors so he can see who’s behind him he checks the mailbox labeled Malo Mail. No one realizes that he is the infamous Mister Malo, righter of wrongs, punisher of bullies.
Pregnant at 15, Mari Pujols believes the baby will supply the family love she yearns for but when she learns the fetus has a heart defect, her friends, sometimes boyfriend, and doctor are there for her.
When the Vasquez siblings’ father left, it seemed nothing could remedy the absence in their lives . . . until a shimmering figure named Luz appeared in the canyon behind their house. Luz filled the void. He shot hoops with seventeen-year-old Hank’s hands. He showed fourteen-year-old Ana cinematic beauty behind her eyelids. He spoke kindly to eight-year-old Milo. But then Luz left, too, and he took something from each of them. As a new school year begins, Hank, Ana, and Milo must carry on as if an alien presence never altered them. But how can they ever feel close to other people again when Luz changed everything about how they see the world and themselves? In an imaginative and heartfelt exploration of human–and non-human–nature, Leah Thomas champions the unyielding bonds between family and true friends.
For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, hiding a terrible legacy, until mysterious Fel arrives and Estrella helps him explore his dangerous past.
Twelve-year-old María Luisa O’Neill-Morales (who really prefers to be called Malú) reluctantly moves with her Mexican-American mother to Chicago and starts seventh grade with a bang–violating the dress code with her punk rock aesthetic and spurning the middle school’s most popular girl in favor of starting a band with a group of like-minded weirdos.
Shy fifteen-year-old Cuban American Victoria Cruz feels trapped by the monotony of running on the cross country team and keeping up with her studies to maintain her scholarship to her prestigious college prep school, but the chance to join a rock band in need of a lead singer gives her the opportunity to confront her anxieties, find love and disappointment, and create a new playlist for her life.
Having fled the rampaging revolutionaries in Mexico in 1911, thirteen-year-old Evangelina and her family face unexpected prejudice and violence in Texas.
Recovering from a shooting and stereotyped as a Chicano gangbanger, fourteen-year-old Victor Reyes loves reading books, has a genius girlfriend and an art teacher who mentors and encourages him to apply to art schools, but Victor cannot seem to overcome society’s expectations for him.
In addition to the ordinary problems of a Puerto Rican teenager in Brooklyn, Sierra Santiago is working on developing her shadowshaping skills, and she is beginning to think she may need all the skill she can summon because it seems that when she channeled hundreds of spirits through herself in order to defeat Wick she woke up something very powerful and very unfriendly and put her family and friends at risk.