In this Romeo and Juliet-inspired retelling set during the civil rights era, a Mexican American girl is driven to join a movement for justice after her white classmate and best friend from the barrio are tragically murdered.

Rosa Capistrano has been attending posh North Phoenix High School to boost her chances of a college education and a career in journalism, thanks to the groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education verdict for desegregation. But though she’s legally allowed to be there, it’s still unsafe for Mexican Americans. That’s why she’s secretly passing as Rosie, a white girl. All she has to do to secure her future is make sure her Mexican home life and her white school experience never intersect.

However, Rosa’s two worlds collide when her best friend Ramon and classmate Julianne meet and find themselves entangled in a star-crossed romance. Rosa is terrified about what their relationship could mean for her and them . . . and her worst fears are soon realized in an unspeakable tragedy. Rosa is thrown into the center of a town-wide scandal and her true identity is put in the spotlight. With the help of Marco, Ramon’s brooding and volatile brother whose passion ignites hers, Rosa must choose what is more important to her—protecting her fragile future, or risking everything to help her friends find justice.

Rosa by Any Other Name is a harrowingly beautiful coming-of-age tale that shines a light on an important and often overlooked facet of US history. An extensive author’s note with research details and a further reading list are included.

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From a global star and Booker Prize finalist, a razor-sharp, unforgettable novel about a maid who’s seen too much and a family at a breaking point

A young girl has died and the family’s maid is being interrogated. She must tell the whole story before arriving at the girl’s death.

Estela came from the countryside, leaving her mother behind, to work for the señor and señora when their only child was born. They wanted a housemaid: “smart appearance, full time,” their ad said. She wanted to make enough money to support her mother and return home. For seven years, Estela cleaned their laundry, wiped their floors, made their meals, kept their secrets, witnessed their fights and frictions, raised their daughter. She heard the rats scrabbling in the ceiling, saw the looks the señor gave the señora; she knew about the poison in the cabinet, the gun, the daughter’s rebellion as she grew up, the mother’s coldness, the father’s distance. She saw it all.

After a series of shocking betrayals and revelations, Estela stops speaking, breaking her silence only now, to tell the story of how it all fell apart. Is this a story of revenge or a confession? Class warfare or a cautionary tale? Building tension with every page, Clean is a gripping, incisive exploration of power, domesticity, and betrayal from an international star at the height of her powers.

Story Locale: Chile

The post Clean first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Lucia Cruz is turning eighteen this year. She should be having a debut, but she is not the debutante type. Everything about a traditional Filipino debut feels wrong for her. Besides, custom dictates that eighteen friends attend her her debut, and Lucia only has one friend—Esmé.

But Esmé wants something different out of her senior year. And, on top of that, Lucia’s mom has planned a debutante ball for her birthday behind her back. She’ll be forced to cobble together a court before her beloved lola arrives from the Philippines.

How far will Lucia stray from her comfort zone in order to appease her family—while staying true to herself? Packed with humor and heart, this is an unforgettable novel by a powerful voice in YA fiction.

The post Eighteen Roses first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

In this groundbreaking novel, Santiago Jose Sanchez plunges us into the heart of one boy’s life. His mother takes him and his brother from Colombia to America, leaving their absent father behind but essentially disappearing herself once they get to Miami.

In America, his mother works as a waitress when she was once a doctor. The boy embraces his queer identity as wholeheartedly as he embraces his new home, but not without a sense of loss. As he grows, his relationship with his mother becomes fraught, tangled, a love so intense that it borders on vivid pain but is also the axis around which his every decision revolves. She may have once forgotten him, disappeared, but she is always on his mind.

He moves to New York, ducking in and out of bed with different men as he seeks out something, someone, to make him whole again. When his mother invites him to visit family in Colombia with her, he returns to the country as a young man, trying to find peace with his father, with his homeland, with who he’s become since he left, and with who his mother is: finally we come to know her and her secrets, her complex ambivalence and fierce love.

Hombrecito—“little man”—is a moving portrait of a young person between cultures, between different ideas of himself. From an extraordinary new talent, this is a story told with startling beauty and intensity, a story for anyone searching for home, searching for a way to love.

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Twenty-four hours: that’s how long fourteen-year-old Elvira Gonzalez is given to come up with the $40,000 she needs to save her kidnapped mother from a drug cartel. It’s 2006 and Elvira’s hometown of Laredo, Texas, has become engulfed by the Mexican Drug War. Elvira’s life is unraveling around her—setting her on a harrowing path that leads her to being locked up in one of South Texas’s worst juvenile detention centers.

After Elvira’s released from juvie, she’s resolved to never go back. That’s when her unexpected salvation arrives in the form of 33-inch-high plastic hurdles. Determined to win a track scholarship out of Laredo, Elvira begins breaking into the school, alone, at 5:30 in the morning to practice hurdling. Soon, she catches the attention of a renowned high school coach, an adult man in his 30s. As they train, their coach-student relationship begins to change, becoming sexual. At just seventeen years old, Elvira experiences the dangers many young athletes face, especially those who are marginalized. In spite of these towering obstacles, Elvira eventually propels herself to become one of the top ranked hurdlers in the USA and the first in her family to go to college.

This inspiring true story of grit, tenacity, and hope traces Elvira’s path as she overcomes impossible hurdles in her race to freedom.

The post Hurdles in the Dark: My Story of Survival, Resilience, and Triumph first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Nearly twenty years after the death of her infant daughter, Rosy is still reeling from all that she’s lost. Desperate to repair the connections to the family she does have—her husband, Desmond, and her eighteen-year-old son, Eddie—she’s determined to lay her grief to rest by the twentieth anniversary of her daughter’s death.

At the same time, Isaura dreads what may be coming for her teenage daughter, Mivi. For centuries in her homeland of Honduras, the young women in Isaura’s family have been subjected to a curse of teenage motherhood and the untimely death of the men they loved. But even after moving thousands of miles away from Pespire to Toronto, Isaura fears that her daughter will not be spared.

Soon, Rosy and Isaura, essentially strangers, become connected in a way neither of them could predict. As they try to look to their future and their children’s, they struggle to put the past behind them—all while Eddie and Mivi contend with the weight of their mothers’ pain and guilt.

Tender and compassionate, The Afterpains is a moving debut novel on motherhood, grief, identity, and belonging.

Story Locale: Toronto, Canada; New York, USA; Pespire, Honduras; Michigan, USA

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Penelope Prado has always dreamed of opening her own pastelería next to her father’s restaurant, Nacho’s Tacos. But her mom and dad have different plans—leaving Pen to choose between disappointing her traditional Mexican American parents or following her own path. When she confesses a secret she’s been keeping, her world is sent into a tailspin. But then she meets a cute new hire at Nacho’s who sees through her hard exterior and asks the questions she’s been too afraid to ask herself.

Xander Amaro has been searching for home since he was a little boy. For him, a job at Nacho’s is an opportunity for just that—a chance at a normal life, to settle in at his abuelo’s, and to find the father who left him behind. But when both the restaurant and Xander’s immigrant status are threatened, he will do whatever it takes to protect his newfound family and himself.

Together, Pen and Xander must navigate first love and discovering where they belong in order to save the place they all call home.

This stunning and poignant novel from debut author Laekan Zea Kemp explores identity, found families and the power of food, all nestled within a courageous and intensely loyal Chicanx community.

The post Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Daniel Cunha has a lot on his mind.

He got dumped by his pregnant girlfriend, his grandfather just dropped dead, and on the anniversary of the raid that doomed his drug-dealing aunt and uncle, his mother makes her unwanted return, years after she fled to marry another American fool like his father.

Misfortune, however, is a Cunha family affair, and no generation is spared. Not Daniel’s grandfather João—poor João—born to a prostitute and forced to raise his siblings while still a child himself. Not João’s wife, Marta, branded as a bruxa, reviled by her mother, and dragged from her Ilha paradise by her scheming daughter, Maria. And certainly not Maria, so envious of her younger sister’s beauty and benevolence that she took her vicious revenge and fled to the States, abandoning her children: Daniel and Lucia, both tainted now by their half-Americanness and their mother’s greedy absence.

There’s poison in the Cunha blood. They are a family cursed, condemned to the pain of deprivation, betrayal, violence, and, worst of all, love. But now Maria has returned to grieve her father and finally make peace with Daniel and Lucia, or so she says. As New Year’s Eve nears, the Cunha family hurtles toward an irrevocable breaking point: a fire, a knife, and a death on the sands of Copacabana Beach.

Amid the cacophony of Rio’s tumult—rampant poverty, political unrest, the ever-present threat of violence—a fierce chorus of voices rises above the din to ask whether we can ever truly repair the damage we do to those we love.

The post Tropicália first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Featuring the most beloved rhymes in Hispanic folklore, this groundbreaking bilingual collection of traditional rhymes is now available in a more affordable paperback format! Parents will appreciate the lower price point and children of all ages will love to read these rhymes out loud.

From children playing merrily in their own backyards to the many colors of the fields and meadows, and from early birds to sleepy mice, this vibrant book is sure to delight any reader!

The post Pio Peep! Traditional Spanish Nursery Rhymes: Bilingual English-Spanish first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

A scorned god.
A mysterious acolyte.
A forgetting drug.
A dangerous forest.

One girl caught between the freedom she always wanted and a sister she can’t bear to leave behind.

Under the cover of the Night Forest, will Lucha be able to step into her own power…or will she be consumed by it?

This gorgeous and fast-paced fantasy novel from acclaimed author Tehlor Kay Mejia is brimming with adventure, peril, romance, and family bonds—and asks what it means for a teen girl to become fully herself.

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