National Hispanic Heritage Month is underway Sept. 15 - Oct. 15. Originally started as Hispanic Heritage Week, it was extended into a month-long celebration recognizing the contributions & influence of Hispanic Americans to the history, culture, & achievements of the United States. To celebrate last year, our book club management team gathered together a bunch of books to read in honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month—all with rave reviews & highly recommended.
Happy reading!
Beth (Book Club Co-founder)
Beth devours science fiction & fantasy interspersed with scuba diving books, historical fiction, food-based books, detective novels, travel books, literature, & poetry. Beth possesses a penchant for Arthurian legends & stays on top of trends by amusing herself with tech/business books.
She picked…
An urban fantasy thriller by a Cuban American living in miami
(She’s actually reading book 7 noting the entire series is fantastic, but book 1 is below.)
My name is Cisco Suarez, but I've been called a lot of things. Wizard, hit man, black magic outlaw. I guess one day I finally went too far because someone left me for dead in a dumpster.
That should've been it for me. End of story. But I'm not like most people. Compelled by equal doses of voodoo and sheer grit, I came back... and I want answers.
Which might explain the zombie pit bull sniffing after me. And the automatic weapons. But I'm too stubbon to back down. I'll go through a voodoo gang, a shape-shifting trickster, and a bloodthirsty vampire if it gets me out of this.
And maybe I'll get a little more than that too. My old life back. A cleared name. A city to protect from the kinds of monsters who did this to me.
Not too shabby for a dead man.
If you like Jim Butcher (Harry Dresden), Ilona Andrews (Kate Daniels), Larry Correia (Monster Hunter International), and Elliot James (Pax Arcana) then you are going to love Domino Finn's contribution to the smart-talking main character that's perpetually stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“After devouring the entire Dresden series by Jim Butcher, I've been dabbling with other series here and there, trying to find other urban fantasy that serves up non-stop action, plausible mystery, solid world building, and a hero with a (somewhat) moral core. Imagine my surprise to find it in a black magic outlaw.” —K.M. Carroll
“A fun, action-packed thrill ride of a series with a bonus—it’s not just another vanilla main character, but a Cuban-American wizard living in Miami written by a Cuban-American living in Miami. Highly recommended!” —Beth McCrea, A World Adventure by Book
Weird dystopia by an author from Mexico who grew up in Texas:
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Tor Best Book of 2019, a Daily Beast Best Summer Beach Reads, one of Buzzfeed’s Books to Read This Spring, and one of the Chicago Review of Books' Best New Books of May.
A parallel universe. South Texas. A third border wall might be erected between the United States and Mexico, narcotics are legal and there’s a new contraband on the market: filtered animals—species of animals brought back from extinction to amuse the very wealthy.
Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life gets complicated after a swashbuckling journalist invites him to an underground dinner at which filtered animals are served. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous and surreal journey, in the course of which he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers.
Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Tears of the Trufflepig is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, and an introduction to a staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction.
”This wildly imaginative, highly addicting, and ultimately endearing speculative first novel offers borderlands storytelling with an SF twist.” —Booklist
“Readers of this breakout work [will leave] thrilled and disoriented in equal measure.” —The Wall Street Journal
“This novel is unlike any you will have read before . . . Flores weaves an enthralling, mind-bending tale about a border resident who sets out on a quest for an animal who lives on only in legend: the trufflepig. Smart, entertaining, and highly relevant, Flores’s trippy novel is a delight.” —Daily Beast
”Bizarre, macabre, and wryly funny.” —The Nation
A witchy YA fantasy by an author born in Ecuador & raised in NYC
Awarded Best Book of the Year by NPR,
Tor, Bustle, Paste Magazine, & more
Alex is a Bruja, the most powerful witch in a generation…and she hates magic. At her Deathday celebration, Alex performs a spell to rid herself of her power. But it backfires. Her whole family vanishes into thin air, leaving her alone with Nova, a Brujo she can’t trust whose intentions are as dark as the strange marks on his skin.
The only way to get her family back is to travel with Nova to Los Lagos, a land in-between, as dark as Limbo and as strange as Wonderland.
“Inspired by the Ecuadorian Day of the Dead and Santeria, Labyrinth Lost satisfies a hunger for magic and wonder.” —Rich in Color
“Córdova’s magic-infused, delightfully dark story introduces readers to an engrossing, Latin American–inspired fantasy setting and an irresistible heroine.” —Publishers Weekly
“A brilliant brown-girl-in-Brooklyn update on Alice in Wonderland and Dante's Inferno.
Very creepy, very magical, very necessary.” —Daniel José Older, noted author
“Córdova’s world will leave you breathless, and her magic will ignite an envy so green you’ll wish you were born a bruja. Delightfully dark and enchanting. An unputdownable book.” —Dhonielle Clayton, NY Times bestselling author
“A richly Latin American, giddily exciting novel.” —New York Times Book Review
Gemma (Book Club Moderator)
Gemma mainly enjoys literary fiction—anything with strong characters, particularly those older or more eccentric. She also enjoys engrossing long multigenerational sagas, especially anything with a strong sense of place, lots of vivid descriptions, colors, imagery, & local language/expressions.
She picked…
Historical fiction by an author of Cuban & Mexican Descent
Written by the daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Mexico, a masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born.
In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.
From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals—personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others—that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America’s most tangled, honest, human roots.
Coming of age short stories by a dual citizen of Mexico & the US:
The bestselling coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes-sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous—Sandra Cisneros' masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
“Cisneros draws on her rich Latino heritage . . . and seduces with precise, spare prose, creating unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The NY Times Book Review
“Marvelous . . . spare yet luminous. The subtle power of Cisneros’s storytelling is evident. She communicates all the rapture and rage of growing up in a modern world.” —San Francisco Cronicle
“A deeply moving novel...delightful and poignant. . . . Like the best of poetry, it opens the windows of the heart without a wasted word.” —Miami Herald
Julie (Book Club Moderator)
Julie dislikes gratuitous gore, graphic romance, & cowboy-type westerns, but she’ll read nearly anything if there’s a strong story line to support it.
She picked…
An LGBTQIAP+ memoir by an author of Cuban heritage:
Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.
And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.
Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.
“Breathtakingly inventive. . . . Machado’s writing, with its heat and precise command of tone, has always had a sentient quality. But what makes In the Dream House a particularly self-aware structure—which is to say, a true haunted house—is the intimation that it is critiquing itself in real time. . . . Here and in her short stories, Machado subjects the contemporary world to the logic of dreaming.” —The New Yorker
“Machado’s wit and compulsive post-mortem approach configure her story into a wildly propulsive memoir, an ambulatory survey of the genre.” —The NY Times Book Review
“A tour-de-force meditation on trauma, survival and the language we use to talk about it all.” —TIME, Best Books of 2019
Coming of Age Historical Fiction by an author from the Dominican Republic who came to the US as a child:
Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez’s beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father’s role in an attempt to overthrow brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wondrous but not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways as the girls try find new lives: by straightening their hair and wearing American fashions, and by forgetting their Spanish. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating to be caught between the old world and the new. Here they tell their stories about being at home—and not at home—in America.
“Poignant . . . Powerful . . . Beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Extraordinary.” —The Bloomsbury Review
“Simply wonderful.” —Los Angeles Times
“A clear-eyed look at the insecurity and yearning for a sense of belonging that are a part of the immigrant experience . . . Movingly told.” —The Washington Post Book World
“The Hispanic Joy Luck Club . . . A luminous poem, rich and dreamy as a slow samba. A+.” —Entertainment Weekly
Sue (Book Club Moderator)
Sue enjoys variety, including cultural history, travel, & food books, as well as classics. However, she gravitates mainly toward literary & historical fiction.
She picked…
Magical realism by An author of mexican descent
In the 1950s, tensions remain high in the border town of La Frontera. Penny loafers and sneakers clash with boots and huaraches. Bowling shirts and leather jackets compete with guayaberas. Convertibles fend with motorcycles. Yet amidst the discord, young love blooms at first sight between Fulgencio Ramirez, the son of impoverished immigrants, and Carolina Mendelssohn, the local pharmacist’s daughter. But as they’ll soon find out, their bonds will be undone by a force more powerful than they could have known.
30 years after their first fateful encounter, Fulgencio Ramirez is conducting his daily ritual of reading the local obituaries in his cramped pharmacy office. After nearly a quarter of a century of waiting, Fulgencio sees the news he’s been hoping for: his nemesis, the husband of Carolina Mendelssohn, has died.
The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez weaves together the past and present as Fulgencio strives to succeed in America, break a mystical family curse, and win back Carolina’s love after their doomed youthful romance. Through enchanting language and meditations about the porous nature of borders—cultural, geographic, and otherworldly—The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez offers a vision of how the past has divided us, and how the future could unite us.
“Rudy Ruiz’s first novel is told with wit and verve. Entertaining and dramatic, this novel will delight readers and leave you wanting more.” —Nora Comstock de Hoyos, PhD, founder, Las Comadres Para Las Américas
“A magical realist tale of star-crossed lovers in a border town…There’s a family curse, immigration politics, and love. What more could you ask for? —Book Riot
“Ruiz’s novel is full of life, a brew of contemporary and historical fiction, a coming-of-age tale, adventurous, mysterious, and romantic, laced with social commentary, both spiced and sweetened by the grand Latinx tradition of magical realism…Ruiz’s voice is distinctive, though the cadence is familiar, recognizable to readers of Márquez, Borges, and Esquivel. Ruiz’s style is also somehow comforting, recalling literature past. Fulgencio has the medicine we need right now.” —Lone Star Literary Life
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Happy reading!