 here feel free to click the subscribe button I post every thursday or also give this video a thumbs up if this seems interesting to you but today's video is surrounded by a holiday that will be happening next Wednesday that I am super excited for I haven't celebrated it in a while but that is Cinco de Mayo I grew up surrounded by a community that celebrated it and it was so much fun there's so much good food so much culture and love for people and so yeah Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican holiday and it basically for those of you who don't know is when the Mexican army defeated the French army and that is really great for them so here are some book recommendations either by Mexican authors or set in Mexico or somehow tied to Mexico for you guys to put on your TVRs as Cinco de Mayo is coming up so here are some Cinco de Mayo recommendations the first one of course I had to go with was going to be Mexican Gothic and this is Silvia Moreno Garcia and this is more of a horror kind of thriller book I know there are a couple of horror read-a-fans happening right now so this would also be great for one of those but for those of you don't know Mexican Gothic is about a woman whose sister newly weds in Englishman and they move to the countryside and one day she gets this frantic letter from her sister saying you know things are going well she's in trouble she needs some new helper so the main character goes to the biggest state in the countryside to help her sister and then a whole bunch of suspicious things start happening and she's just not sure what to do or how to react or how to help the next one is Palo Santiago and the River of Tears and this was written by Teflar came Mejia Mejia Mejia I'm so sorry but this is a book that was presented by Rick Warden and it kind of follows like a Mexican mythology-esque it talks about this girl who has two friends and her mother is very superstitious and so Paola the main character and her friends would always meet by the river against her mother's wishes until one day her friend goes missing and she's like we need to find them because the police aren't going to and this is not the first children disappearance to happen around this river so she goes on this magical journey to find out what is happening to these children and why and how she can stop it I loved this book when I read it I read it over audiobook and I just flew right through it the next one on this list is I am not your perfect Mexican daughter and this is by Erica el Sanchez and this is a really interesting contemporary as the main character Julia and her family grow up in Chicago and she has her sister Olga who kind of is the perfect Mexican daughter you know she does everybody wants her to do she follows the traditions however Julia is not so inclined she wants to leave her family and go to college and kind of live more American lifestyle and not really she's not really considered your perfect Mexican daughter and then her sister Olga passes away in a fortunate accident I believe and some secrets start to come up about Olga that may start to diminish her reputation and her image and so Julia goes to investigate that and try and lift up her sister's memory to be exactly what it should have been rather than what it was also sorry if you can hear like creaking or typing in the background my husband is working on his final as it is finals week so just ignore the little background moving on the next book that I want to talk about it is like water for chocolate and this is Esquivel and this was a book originally written in Spanish and it's a huge bestseller in Mexico and then also has been translated into English and is even a bestseller here in the States which is super cool and so this book is about Tita who is the youngest daughter in the de la Garza family and it is her responsibility to to not get married but to watch after her abuela and her mother and her family but she ends up falling in love with a man and he loves her back and so he decides that he's going to marry her sister Rosa and that's how he can stay close to Tita is by still marrying into the family even if it's not the sister that he loves and so I assume there's gonna be a whole bunch of like family drama and it just sounds so good to me and also it because he's a cook it sounds like there's gonna be so many delicious food descriptions and I am here for it this next one is a recent release and it's called somewhere between bitter and sweet and it is by can Kier Kent I'm so sorry if I said that wrong but this is about a girl who wants to open her own pastel area next to her father her family is really nacho taco shop and she's kind of struggling with the whole you know pursuing her dreams and not necessarily taking over the family business and she wants to kind of follow her own path and I believe a big secret is revealed that kind of shakes everyone a little bit but one of the new hires at her father's restaurant we also follow him quite a bit as he is dealing with immigration status and some secrets of his own and then there I believe that's the love story and it sounds like such a good book and it was very recently released so I have not yet gotten a chance to get it and read it but it just it sounds like so much fun and again with the food thing there's certain to be a food thing here and it just all sounds delicious moving on I'm going to talk about the Labyrinth Lost and this is by Sorena Cordova Cordova and this is a fantastical magical story that I believe was also translated to English although I'm not completely sure if it was first written in Spanish but it is about this daughter named Alex and she is supposed to be the next powerful bruja in her family which bruja means like witch kind of like sorcerer type but she doesn't really want to be a bruja she that's that's not her thing so when her death day comes and it's time for a ceremony and ritual she performs a spell that is supposed to get rid of her power however it kind of backfires and her entire family disappears and she's like oh crap what did I just do and the only one left to help her is Nova who is a bruja who she is not excited to work with but she needs to get her family back somehow and so it follows that journey and how it really looks at the themes of family and like a lot of these books follow the theme of family but that's family is so important so like why not it's great and then the last book that I'm going to talk to you guys about today is called the Stormrunner and this is also presented by Rick Rourden but it is written by JC Cervantes and this is actually my current read I am 92% of the way down with the book and I'm going to finish it today and I am super excited to finish it it more so follows Mayan mythology and our main character is actually born and raised in New Mexico in the States rather than like actually in Mexico but he does have Mexican heritage I believe and like Mayan heritage and I just thought it'd be a fun book to add in here as it still celebrates Central American culture and mythology and it's really cool so it's about this kid who has one leg that's quite a bit shorter than the other so he needs to walk around with a cane and he finds out that he's not exactly human and that he's in some prophecy to you know release the God of like darkness and death and decay name a pooch and he's like I don't want to do that and then he goes and does it anyway and I will probably talk more about this book in a recent reads video whenever I do one of those whenever I finally finish some of the books that I've been reading because with classes I've kind of been putting reading a little bit on the back burner but yeah so that will be coming but the Stormrunner so it's a very fun book and he has to figure out how to then destroy the God that he had released just a day or so beforehand and stop the world from crumbling yeah it's it's a good time I'm definitely seeing a lot of similarities between this book and Percy Jackson which was not really the case with Balala Santiago like that was a very different independent book so it's been interesting it's been fun there you go there's some re Mexican authors and setting recommendations think of a mile coming up this coming Wednesday and so I am I won't be able to celebrate very much because we're still you know kind of in a lockdownish quarantine but I hope you guys if you do celebrate you have a wonderful think of the mile if you don't maybe you learn something or you just want to read some Mexican reads to support those authors and that culture but like I said if you're new here please consider subscribing I post every Thursday and I hope you liked this video if you did give it a thumbs up also feel free to comment down below if there are any books written by Mexican Mexican authors or with Mexican main characters or set in Mexico or some chunk of the book that I don't know about I would love for you to comment them down below and then also just comment really anything if we want to chat for anything bookish but until I see you guys in my next video I wish you all a happy reading