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In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguirre in the small border town of La Cienega, Texas. The old woman is sure Pilar stole her husband and, in a heated outburst, lays a curse on Pilar and her family.
More than forty years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father's moods, his rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother passes away, Lulu finds herself drawn to the glamorous stranger who crashed the funeral and who lives alone and shunned on the edge of town.
Their unexpected kinship picks at the secrets of Lulu's family's past. As the quinceañera looms—and we move between these two strong, irascible female voices—one woman must make peace with the past, and one girl pushes to embrace her future.
Rich with cinematic details—from dusty rodeos to the excitement of a Selena concert and the comfort of conjunto ballads played at family gatherings—this memorable debut is a love letter to the Tejano culture and community that sustain both of these women as they discover what family means.
"A vibrant portrait of two strong women and their mixed feelings about home." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Fuentes is a seamless storyteller: the narrative is rich in Mexican culture and fully realized characterizations, especially the defiant Lulu and the overbearing Julio. Fans of Ana Castillo and Erika Sanchez will be thrilled." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Malas is a machete: sharp, terrifying, and beautiful. Each character feels dynamic, familiar, and so utterly human in their glorious messiness. Fuentes has achieved something rare and indelible with this story of complex women." ―Erika L. Sánchez, New York Times bestseller author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter and Crying in the Bathroom
"Fuentes seamlessly knits familiar history and urban legend with a heartfelt, modern, coming of age story to deliver a vivacious, page-turning novel of rebellion and rebirth. The truth, in the hands of Fuentes lively and beautiful prose, liberates these characters and the reader alike." ―Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming
"Malas ensnares you with its antic energy, vibrant secrets, and the wickedly smart, self-assured Lulu at the center of it all. An enviably electric debut from Marcela Fuentes, who knows in her bones that the bad girls living in family cuentos, in telenovelas, and in town gossip are also the ones that glow with the brightest fire inside." ―Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences
This information about Malas was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marcela Fuentes is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer and essayist. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was the 2016-2017 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in the Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Texas Highways Magazine, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. Her debut novel Malas (June 2024) and linked story collection My Heart Has More Rooms Than a Whorehouse are forthcoming from Viking Books. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas.
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