 Hey everyone, I'm Josh, Teen Services Librarian from the Billy Jean King Main Library. And I'm Julianne, the Youth Services Supervisor also at the Billy Jean King Main Library. And welcome to the first episode of REDIA, the Long Beach Public Library's monthly conversation that highlights new books from our teen collections, airing the third Wednesday of every month. For this month, we're going to be looking at Latinx authors and characters as part of our Vida Latina program. All of these books and more are available for check out from the Long Beach Public Library. All you have to do is go to our catalog, that's encore.lbpl.org and search REDIA920, R-E-A-D-Y-A920. So without further ado, let's jump right into it. Sounds good. So I'm going to start with one I'm actually pretty excited about. It's the New David Espinosa by Freda Seviz. So this is following up his highly regarded first novel, The Closest Have Come. And the second novel is an intense but much needed take on a young man's struggle with body dysmorphia, steroid abuse, and toxic masculinity. After David becomes infamous for a viral video in which he gets beaten up, he joins a gym and decides to bulk up in hopes of defending himself and impressing his friends. We soon see that David's social life is rapidly deteriorating. Things are falling apart as he becomes consumed by this desire to seek out this ideal body. The New David Espinosa explores the silent epidemic that affects a lot of young men today, and it's something that I don't think is talked about enough. And it's done very carefully because Seviz actually also suffered with body dysmorphia as a team. So really, really good timely novel. Thanks for sharing that. I actually hadn't heard of that one. I want to talk about one you may not have heard of because it didn't get as much buzz as I had hoped it would. It's called Tigers Not Daughters by Samantha Maverick. And it's about the four Torah sisters and they dream of escape from their smothering and tyrannical widowed father from their San Antonio neighborhood full of old San Antonio families and from all of the traditions and expectations that go along with both. The summer after their senior year on, the oldest plans to do just that escape. But instead, she falls to her death from her bedroom window. A year later, her three younger sisters are still consumed by grief and haunted by their sister's memory, and their dreams of leaving Southtown now seem completely out of reach. But then strange things start happening around the house. Mysterious laughter, mysterious shadows, mysterious writing on the walls. The sisters begin to wonder if Anna's actually haunting them, trying to send them a message. And if so, what exactly she's trying to say? This book is deeply atmospheric and it's been described as a ghostly Latina little woman. So I'm pretty excited about this one. I want to talk a little bit about the authors since, you know, we're talking about specifically about Latinx authors from all different, all different areas of Latin America or the states with very different backgrounds. Samantha Mabry, her name might not sound Latina, but she is, was born and raised in Dallas and lives there still, teaching, writing and Latinx literature at a community college. She recently tweeted for Latin American Heritage Month. You too are hashtag Latinx, even if you have a super white sounding last name like Mabry, and we mile ability to speak Spanish. And if you don't find those books featuring people who share your background or experience, write those books. That's what I try to do. And Mabry has a couple of other books out and I've tagged them in the catalog for everyone. That's great. It's always good to get a nice wide perspective of what the Latinx experience is like. A lot of times what people think Latinx is, is really narrow and it's really a wide spectrum of experiences. It is. And there's a huge amount of intersectionality in there. But for this next one, I'm going to take us to a galaxy far, far away with Zorida Cordova's Star Wars, A Crash of Fate. So this is an expanded universe novel. It's part of the galaxies edge series, which is was made to promote the Disneyland park. Of course, you got to do it. So it's sure to please all Star Wars fans looking for more. It stars Izzy and Jules, two friends living on the planet Bantu. It's their idyllic childhood home, but it comes all to a crash and halt when Izzy's parents are found dead. So that kind of sets off a bunch of chain of events that causes Izzy to move off world and become a smuggler. So years later, when they're both teens, they have a chance encounter back on planet Bantu and they find themselves joining forces looking to overcome their pasts and uncover these secrets that they've kept from each other and decide to go on the run. This book is a super fun mix of romance, adventure, sci-fi, and these swashbuckling adventures that you've come to expect from a Star Wars story. That sounds really interesting. I'm actually a Star Wars fan myself. So I'll have to check that out. Nice. So funny enough, I also have some Zoraida Cordova to talk to you about. I brought today her Brooklyn Brujas series, which starts with Labyrinth Lost. And this series is not your standard urban fantasy. There are no El's fairies, vampires, or other usual suspects. Instead, we're drawn into a world of African, Caribbean, and Mexican mysticism. Alejandra Alex is a young Bruja or witch from a big family of Brujas and Brujos. She's just about to come of age with the celebration of her death day, which is kind of like a quinceanera, which will activate her powers and allow her to control them. But Alex's biggest secret is that she already has her powers and she doesn't want them. So she decides that instead of embracing her powers, she'll do a spell to banish them. And guess what happens? Instead, she banishes her entire family into a different dimension. Now her family is in danger of being devoured, and that is with a capital D. And Alex will have to rescue them with the help of Nova. Boy, she doesn't know or trust. The second book, Bruja Born, which focuses on Lula, one of Alex's sisters, is also in our collection. And the final book, Wayward Witch, about Alex's other sister Rosa, should be in sometime next month. Zoraita Cordova was actually born in Gayaquil, Ecuador and moved to the States as a young girl. She identifies as Latina and is one of the co-founders of the Latinx and Kiddlet blog, which is a website-centering fellow Latinx authors. She wrote, are you ready for this? She wrote her debut novel, The Vicious Deep, as part of NaNoWriMo in 2010 when she was only 23. And it was bought by a publisher within a week of submission. So I've tagged all of Zoraita's books in our catalog, including The Vicious Deep series, which we don't have in print, but we do have an e-book format. Yeah, you got to use those e-books and audio books, too. I tagged a few of them. Absolutely. And actually, I should mention that most of what we're talking about here today is in multiple formats in our catalog. So my next one, we're going to go on the road, so to speak, with Patrick Flores-Scott's American road trip. This centers around Teodoro Avila and his family during the Great Recession back in 2008. So after his older brother, Manny, returns from serving in Iraq, Teodoro, Manny, and their sister, Xochitl, set out for a road trip. This is a humorous and often heart-wrenching story that follows the Avila siblings as they make their way down the West Coast and into New Mexico. And they're hoping to find a sort of catharsis for Manny, but also bring the family back together, because they've been separated for so long. It's a remarkable coming-of-age story that looks at mental illness, socioeconomic pressures, and the challenges that come with growing up. It's poignant and really nice, well-written. I really enjoyed it. So I actually listen to it in audio, speaking of which we don't have it on audio. But I just want to plug that it's like a really great format. It's also a valid way to consume your books. So I always try to put that out there when I can. Absolutely. And it allows you to multitask in a way that holding a book doesn't necessarily do. I've tried. I've tried reading and doing other things at the same time. It doesn't work out so well. So I'm going to jump on your theme of family and journeys and separation, and talk to you about When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo. This novel in free first tells the story of two sisters who don't know that the other exists until their lives are forever changed by a plane crash. Camino lives in the Dominican Republic and can't wait for the day when her father, her puppy, arrives for his summer visit from New York. But when she gets to the airport to greet him, she finds instead a building full of grieving people. Yahaila is in the middle of a typical day at school in New York when she's called to the principal's office and met there by her mother, who tells her that her father, her hero, has died en route to his annual business trip. Each girl must not live in a world without her father, and nothing will ever be the same. And then their father's secrets are brought to light, the fact that he has two families. And the sisters find that there's someone who shares their grief in a way that no one else can. Elizabeth Acevedo, who is Dominican-American and identifies as Afro-Latina, we were talking about there being no one way to be Latinx, started writing poetry when she was 12, moved on to spoken word or slam poetry in her teens, and actually was a national poetry slam champion. The great thing about her novels is they're written in both poetry and prose, which is really lovely. We've got a couple of other titles by her that I've read, The Poet X and With the Fire on High, which, of course, I've tagged in the catalog. I loved The Poet X, and I'm really excited to read that one, so I'm looking forward to it. Going to continue this theme of dead parents because we would be without so many great stories without dead parents. Such a great trope. So we've got Teen Titans Raven by Cami Garcia and Gabriel Piccolo. So it's a more grounded take on the traditional superhero story that some of us might be a little tired of, I know I am, but I really enjoyed this, so I feel like if I can advocate for it, then it must be a pretty strong graphic novel. So it's written by Cami Garcia, as I mentioned, who you might know as the co-author of the Beautiful Creatures series and an upcoming Brazilian artist by the name of Gabriel Piccolo. So Teen Titans Raven introduces Rachel Roth, who is our main character, and she is involved in a car accident, and it gives her amnesia and also kills her adoptive mother. And so at which point she has to move to New Orleans and move back in with her adoptive mother's sister. And in the meantime, kind of put together the pieces of her life. On top of all this, she has to deal with a new school, these powers that seem to be manifesting, and of course, what a high school experience is without demons, both real and imagined. So Raven has to decide if she's ready to face what's buried in her past and the darkness that is building inside of her. And also be on the lookout for the follow-up, which is going to be focusing on Beast Boy coming this fall, also by the same writing pair. So keep an eye out for it. We should have it probably in the upcoming months. Awesome. We will have it in the upcoming months. I saw the order go through. So I don't think there are any dead parents in my next books. So I guess I'm gonna do a little bit of a 180 because there's no superpowers necessarily. But I'm gonna talk to you about a dystopian duology by Taylor K. Mahia, starting with, we set the dark on fire. And in Medial, upper-class girls are trained for one of two roles in their polarized society. They either get to run a husband's household or they get to raise his children. And both of these roles are promised a life of comfort and luxury because everything's kind of a political mess with lots of uprisings from the lower-class outside of that world. Danny is the top student in her class, but her future depends on nobody learning her darkest secret, right? There's always a secret. Her pedigree is a lie. Her parents sacrificed everything to get forged documents so she could rise above her station. And now she's about to marry the son of an important family. So she has to keep the truth hidden or be sent back to the fringes of society where famine and poverty are the everyday reality. On her graduation night though, nothing can prepare Danny for the choices she must make as events unfold, especially when she is asked to spy for a resistance group desperately fighting to bring equality to Medial. Can she give up everything that she's worked so hard for and ignore this massive sacrifice that her parents have made in order to achieve freedom for all of Medial and maybe even to have a chance at a forbidden love? These questions are more answered in this book and in the sequel, which is, We Unleash the Merciless Storm. Taylor is biracial Mexican-American, born and raised in Oregon where she still lives. And she feels really passionate about the representation of Latinx in media and the oppression the community faces. She says that she wrote this duology as a love letter to queer Latin, Quill, let me try that again, to queer Latina girls who refuse to allow the world to box them in. We get so used to saying Latinx that when it's gendered, my tongue gets a little tied. I apologize. Taylor hasn't written any other books right now that are in the young adult collection, although she's in a couple of short story collections, but she does have a middle grade out. And of course I didn't write the name down, but it's about a girl dealing with La Llorona. So that one looks pretty exciting. It's part of the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, which is actually centering a lot of BIPOC protagonists. So I really like where he's going with that. Yeah, I really like that it's exploring that wider mythology, because I think when people think of mythology, they think of Western canon mythology, which I find very boring. So the next book I'm gonna be talking about, I'm gonna go back to graphic novels and talk about photographic, The Life of Graciela Iturbide, it's written by Isabel Quintero, and the art is by Zeke Pina. So you might recognize Isabel from her previous kind of more famous novel, Gabby a Girl in Pieces. This one is more biographical and grounded, and it's tracing the life and work of a Mexican photographer. So after a fateful turn of events, this young woman turns to photography as an outlet for her pain. This beautiful narrative we used to be through this journey across Mexico and eventually the world. As she becomes a world renowned photographer, it mixes real images of her photography in the comic next to Pena's bold black and white art and Quintero's beautiful prose. It's a really, really great book. I really enjoyed it. I like narrative nonfiction. I also like graphic novels. So I think the mixture of the two is really well done. And I love sharing stories about individuals in the past that you aren't necessarily told about in history class. So this is just my bread and butter. It's a great novel. Great, thank you for sharing that with me. I definitely hadn't heard of that one. I wanna talk to you next about Dear Haiti Love Alain, which is basically a love letter to the Haiti written by Maika and Maritza Moulit. Moulit, so many people have a really singular image of Haiti in their mind. And Haiti is so much more than what we think of it as. And that's discovered by our protagonist in Dear Haiti, Love Alain. After an incident at school involving her, a Latin American history project and a desire to send her gossipy classmates a message, Alain is shipped off to Haiti, where she's expected to learn more about the history and traditions of her native land. As she uncovers things about her mother and the curse her family is said to have, Alain goes on a fantastical quest to help herself and to save all of her family. This novel is relayed through letters and journal entries, which is one of my favorite ways to read a novel. And it balances the sometimes gritty reality of life in Haiti with Alain's casual wit and sarcasm to present a nuanced view of the island nation from the perspective of someone who's both an outsider and also has deep connections to the people in the culture. The Afro-Latina Moulit sisters, who are two of the family of four daughters, are Miami natives whose parents are Haitian immigrants. They work together to create a story that at its heart is about a girl getting to know her mother, her culture, herself, but also to make it clear that black girls can go on hilarious, crazy, life-changing adventures too, which I really appreciate. Dear Haiti, which was the Moulit sisters' first novel came out last year and their second book, One of the Good Ones, should be out early next year, hopefully. Sounds really cool. And I think we've talked about this before, but that's a really nice book cover. I think we both agree that it's okay to judge books by their covers. Absolutely. I thought they're really, really, I was gonna say it's a beautiful cover. Okay, so for my last book, I'm talking about We Are Not From Here by Jenny Torres Sanchez. And so it focuses on La Bestia, which if you're not familiar with, it's this expanse of train track that migrants moving north from Central America have to face. It's a violent sort of grizzly stretch where migrants are faced with violence from other people. They're often horribly disfigured and dismembered by kind of jumping from train to train. It's a really brutal expanse. So We Are Not From Here focuses on three teams, three Guatemalan teams, as they traverse this treacherous passage. And it unflinchingly depicts this brutal, but unforgiving journey that they're facing as they set out for the Southern US border. Torres Sanchez balances these moments of danger and violence with the persistent feeling of hope and resilience and a realistic depiction of those who are forced to leave their home seeking safety and opportunity. Another one I hadn't heard of. You did a great job in pulling some books that were, I think, kind of off the beaten path. And I think that our patrons are really gonna appreciate that. I'm gonna turn a total 180 from where we just were and talk about a fairy tale adaptation, actually, called Dark and Deepest Red. Let me hold it so that you can see the title, Dark and Deepest Red by Annemarie Macklemore. In the summer of 1518, there's a strange sickness that sweeps through Strasbourg. And I forgot to mention, this is a dual timeline book. So it doesn't just set in the past. So the strange sickness is sweeping through Strasbourg. Women are dancing in the streets, some until they fall down dead. And of course, as it was back in 1518, rumors of witchcraft spread and suspicion turns towards Lavinia and her family. And Lavinia may have to do the unimaginable to save herself and everyone that she loves. Five centuries later, so if you do the math, that basically puts us around 2018 or 2020 right now. Five centuries later, Rosella puts on a pair of red shoes and they make her dance uncontrollably and won't come off. She's drawn to a boy who knows the dancing fever's history better than anyone, Aimeel, whose family was actually blamed for the fever hundreds of years ago. But there's more to what happened in 1518 than even Aimeel knows and discovering the truth may decide whether Rosella survives the red shoes or not. Annemarie, Annemarie Macklemore, the author, their official bio says they were born in the foothills of the St. Gabriel Mountains and taught by their family to hear La Llorona in the Santa Ana winds. At the time they began writing Deep in Darkest Red, they identified as a queer Latinx woman, but writing the story turned out to actually be a journey of further personal discovery for them. They say, I wrote this book not realizing that I was non-binary. And now they use the personal pronouns they and them and their husband is trans. Macklemore is actually really known for crafting stories filled with magical realism and fairy tale themes. She's got several others and of course you can find them tagged in our catalog. I think that kind of wraps us up for stories. Yeah, that was all of mine. That was also all of mine. We only had a limited amount of time today to talk, so we couldn't hit all of the authors that we might've wanted to, but there's several others. Daniel Jose Older, Lillian Rivera, Benjamin and Lyrae Sines, Erika L. Sanchez, Adam Silvera, Francis Gregg Stork and then many more than that, but we're gonna go ahead and at least tag books by those six in the catalog, as well as the other books by these authors that we talked to about today. So yeah, thank you so much for joining us today, everybody, for the first episode of Redia. So remember, check us out every third Wednesday of the month, stay tuned and we'll see you next month. Don't forget the tag. See you.