Excerpt from Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Never had she seen so many people here, in her little village. Most days, it seemed the world had forgotten Santa Clara Popocalco. It was the sort of place that existed only because no larger town had cared to claim it. It lay dry and hollow, anchored to this earth by the Sierra Norte to the east, Oaxaca city to the west. Every morning a cold front rolled in from a distant shore. It collided with the hillside and smothered the valley in fog that smelled faintly, sweetly of corn. Every afternoon, the sun burned through the fog, and houses regained their low and addled forms.

Popocalco offered no work, only the growing and eating of a few stalks of corn. When the money left, the people followed, except for the very poor and very old, who still grew crops to feed themselves and sell in local markets, who gurgled through the village square every morning and in the evenings, visiting the church, nodding to the faces, always the same faces, and napping and cooking and eating and washing, sweeping their front steps each day, not exactly waiting to die, Soli believed, but not quite living, either.

For too long, she'd pushed away the thought of leaving. Papi! She was his only one. And Mama. Mama would crawl into bed and never crawl out. But decay had spread like the valley fog, until it found its way to Soli. She'd breathed so much of it in that she couldn't breathe it out again. She was filling up with silence and heavy bones. She was eighteen. And then, the letter from Silvia. Inside, somewhere between her chest and chin, a seed split open to the sun and she began to wonder: Could she? And how? And eventually: When? And why not? And how soon? Her life lay elsewhere. If she stayed in Popocalco, she'd be staying for them, the gentle old souls, her mother and father and the sullen corn, watching all those lives wind down to their modest end.

The fireworks family entered the square, pushing the castillo de luces, a tower of scaffolding rigged with rockets and sparklers.

In the big picture, Popocalco was nowhere. In the big picture, it was a thin and spiny stretch of the past.

She waited for an hour at the church door, until all her readiness had been sighed away. Papi wandered off. She stood deflated and alone, certain she'd missed Manuel by seven minutes. A brass band began to play, the somber nasal tune Soli had heard every year, for as long as she could remember, at la Noche del Maiz. She closed her eyes. Applause. She didn't need to open them to know that a teenage boy was climbing the castillo, lifting a fiery pole to the highest joints of the tower. In a moment, the first sparks would pinwheel through the night. And they would begin, one small explosion followed by the next, a rapturous storm.

Punctuality. Seven minutes. Time was religion in America, Papi had warned her. If she'd missed her chance by seven minutes, it was her own wretched fault.

But then, a layer beneath the noise, a rustle. "Solimar." She opened her eyes. At first, all she saw were the bushy jut of his chin and the gleam of hair slicked back. He could have been the Devil in the firelight, for all she could see. He stepped forward. Papi, all at once, beside her. He shook Papi's hand. Now this, now here, was a man with a passport. Manuel would visit the next day to go over their plan. He'd get Soli to California, he said, no matter what it took. She was leaving! The promise of it stoked a flame that blazed through her. Already, Popocalco, this house of smoke, was shrinking away. Already, this existence nothing but a distant prick of light. Electrified by the promise of forward motion, Soli stretched up to kiss the sky, growing and growing, until she too was a flaming tower, a castle of light, sparking from the eyes, spitting streaks of joy.

Chapter One

Preeti Patel was getting married. Kavya was wearing black.

Excerpted from Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran. Copyright © 2016 by Shanthi Sekaran. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.