Spring Releases by Latine Authors to Have On Your Radar

This novel about a mother and son is told in two timelines. It begins in 1970 with the titular Gloria as she prepares to attend a real-life concert where Argentine singer Sandro became the first Latin American to perform at Madison Square Garden. Five decades later, her son reflects on the ways in which the time he has spent in New York City mirrors his mother’s experience there once upon a time. The story takes us from New York to Colombia and Miami and traces how the choices made in youth can impact future generations.

This book sounds so juicy! May Iverson, known as Mother May I to her followers (barf), built a big ol’ influencer empire making videos of her and her five mixed-race daughters when they were kids. But those girls are all grown up now, and it turns out commodifying your progeny’s childhood can really come back to bite you in the ass. May’s newlywed husband is dead, and her mansion was torched to cover up the crime—but who’s responsible? This exploration of influencer culture, race, gender, sexuality, and class feels right on time, and I can’t help but feel that we’re going to see an influx of real-life versions of this type of story.

Related side note: The Hulu documentary Devil in the Family about influencer Ruby Franke is a deeply upsetting but excellent watch. 

Brielle loves to cook, but caring for her chronically ill mother has kept her from pursuing her culinary dreams. Then her mom suddenly loses her job and Brielle decides to put her skills to work to help make ends meet. The richie-rich families she cooks for are obsessed with her dishes, blissfully unaware that Brielle’s secret ingredient is… human flesh. This story is inspired by Haitian zombie lore (I said there’d be zombies) and that cover is (zombie) chef’s kiss.

When drought forces the Tewa people of the high-desert city of Puye to leave the place they’ve called home for 100 generations, they rebuild and form an adobe farming settlement called Singing Water Village. Here, three generations of Tewa women—Blue Water, North Star, and Butterfly— live for years in harmony with the land. But in 1598, the peace they’ve so carefully cultivated is destroyed by Spanish invaders, and North Star is separated from her infant daughter during a cruel and brutal raid. Through these three women’s stories and three more generations of Tewa women, we get a family saga set during the first 100 years of Spanish colonization in what is now New Mexico.

I’ll never pass up the chance to tell you when our magical realism queen has a new book out. This one opens in 19th-century San Francisco, where a nun gives birth to a baby girl named Emilia del Valle. She grows up to be a self-sufficient and independent young woman with a passion for writing, writing fiction under a man’s pen name for a while before deciding to pursue a career in journalism. That decision will eventually take her to Chile where she’s assigned, along with a reporter named Will, to cover the looming civil war. There she meets her estranged father, the Chilean aristocrat who abandoned her mother before her birth, and comes face to face with the violent conflict tearing Chile apart.

You can’t bill a book as Mexican Gothic meets The Shining and expect me not to go feral. In 1923 in Colombia, Antonia and her family settle into a big ol’ mansion that sits above a legendary waterfall. Sure, it’s haunted and every night they spend there is riddled with nightmares, but they stay until tragedy strikes and Antonia’s mother falls into the waterfall to her death. Antonia’s father is destroyed by grief (understandably) but tries to burn the house down with Antonia still in it (guey, te pasas). Three years later, Antonia returns to the home that has haunted her dreams when it’s converted into a swanky hotel, a trip that brings up a lot of old feelings, suspicions, and fragmented memories that make Antonia question the circumstances around her mother’s death. Give. it. to. me.

This important work from the author of Cantoras is an oral history of a generation of trans and gender-nonconforming elders of color. It is a collection of testimonies from 20 elders, featuring stories of resilience, community, loss, found family, and both the ordinary and extraordinary experiences of living fiercely in a world hostile to one’s very existence. The older I get, the more I realize what a privilege it is to have elders around to tell their stories, one not afforded to so many marginalized folks, especially in the LGBTQIA+ community. This is one I’m going to take my time with.

I am very much in the thrall of the third season of Yellowjackets, so this YA horror novel piqued my interest when I saw it described as Yellowjackets meets The Walking Dead. Flora is a teen girl in a Los Angeles suburb leading a group of survivors on a journey through the apocalypse after a global outbreak of a rabies mutation that turns people into very violent zombies. She and her brother are still alive, but their mom is dead and their dad is missing. They decide their best chance at survival is to head up to the Northern California cabin they used to vacation at, hoping to see their dad again—if they can survive.

When I saw this book described as “a fun and flirty rom-com about a pact between friends that goes awry when one of them suddenly decides to get married,” my first reaction was to squeal and go, “Is this My Best Friend’s Wedding but with brown people?!” It’s not exactly, and that’s probably a good thing (Julia, girl, love you, your hair was and is goals but your character was the worst!!). The actual premise: Mari and Javier are best friends who made a pact in college never to date someone the other one doesn’t approve of. A decade later, Mari, who got tired of waiting around for Javi, is engaged and Javi is having some big feelings about it. He decides he’s going to confess his love, but that will mean convincing Mari that the guy she’s engaged to ain’t it.