Showing results by narrator "Victoria Villarreal" in All Categories

After experiencing a devastating earthquake, the spirit of a charming and vibrant Mexican neighborhood might be shaken, but it cannot be broken. As a little girl and her dog embark on their daily walk through the city, they skip and spin to the familiar sounds of revving cars, clanking bikes...

Kansas collects beautiful words in her notebook; in real life, she can't find any. Kansas wants to take one final jump. She gets bullied at school and has lost touch with her family, just like her speech. However, before she can plunge to her death, she meets River. River, with his ocean-blue...

Uni the Unicorn's best friend is painting a mural and she needs help! This Step 2 Reader about believing in yourself and the power of friendship will resonate with kids who are learning to read. The little girl and her friends are painting a mural next to the new public garden! It is going to be...

As a young Nahua girl in Mexico during the early 1900s, Luz learned to grind corn in a metate, twist yarn with her toes, and weave on a loom. By the fire, she listened to stories of her community’s joys, suffering, and survival, and wove them into her heart. When the Mexican Revolution came to her village, Luz and her family were forced to flee. In Mexico City, Luz became a model for painters, sculptors, and photographers such as Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and Tina Modotti.

A sharp and heartfelt story about a young soccer-loving girl who’s an interpreter for her Spanish-speaking parents. Some kids have one job: to be a kid! Cecilia has two. When she isn't on the soccer field scoring goals, she's accompanying her parents to all kinds of grown-up places, like the...

A vivid historical fiction account of the community activism behind San Diego's Chicano Park—home to the largest outdoor mural collection in the U.S.—and just one example of the Mexican American community’s rich history of resistance and resilience. Barrio Logan, one of San Diego’s...

Deandra Hendricks works her fingers to the bone at two jobs to keep her Los Angeles apartment. With a rapidly dwindling savings account, the prospects for her future are bleak. So when her cousin invites her to visit Axia—the hidden, magical hub their grandparents retired to—she agrees. Deandra doesn’t possess a stitch of magic herself, but a long weekend vacation in a strange, new town might be just what she needs. Her first day in Axia is so bizarre, though. Just when she thinks her day can’t get any stranger, she finds a baby dragon trapped in a dumpster.

On the evening of September 24, 2004, sixteen-year-old Alicia María Betancourt was killed in a car accident. Popular, happy, fun-loving Alicia daughter, sister, and friend to so many gone in an instant. How would those left behind cope with such a sudden, devastating loss? Wrestling with grief, anger, mortality, and spirituality, Alicia's loved ones struggle to create a lasting place in their hearts for someone who is no longer a physical presence.

An immersive, historical novel based on true events: In 1938, Orson Welles's legendary radio dramatization of H.G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds terrified Americans into believing Martians were invading. Eleven years later, an Ecuadorian radio station adapted the show—with catastrophic consequences. Now, two young journalists are determined to uncover what really happened to their families that night—even as secrets endanger their future.

All Stevie Choi ever wanted was a cozy life in suburbia—a loving husband, adorable kids, a dog. That simple dream shattered into a million pieces when she was only seventeen. She’s spent the years since trying to outrun the pain and make something of herself, if only to prove to her estranged family that she’s happy and successful—even though she’s secretly yearning for another chance at love. If only she believed she deserved it....

Deandra “Dee” Hendricks is settling into her new life in Axia. She’s got her trusty baby dragon, Havoc, by her side; is sharing an apartment with her best friend and roommate, Wendy; and even has her first pet-sitting client. Things are looking up!

When Lou enlists her best friend, Molly, to shave her head, it’s partly so she doesn’t have to deal with washing her hair all the time while on tour—and partly because she’s ready to be a new person. No stranger to reinventing herself, restless Lou is a Cuban-American girl who’s never left Texas, let alone the country. But the “New Lou” has deferred her first semester at Texas State to work for a celebrity musician on tour.

Arranging ofrendas. Brewing pericon into a healing tea. Releasing traumas through baños and limpias. Herbalist and curandera Atava Garcia Swiecicki spent decades gathering this traditional knowledge of curanderismo, Mexican folk healing, which had been marginalized as Chicanx and Latinx Americans assimilated to US culture. She teaches how to follow the path of the curandera, as she herself learned from apprenticing with Mexican curanderas, studying herbal texts, and listening to her ancestors.

Summer ends, the season changes, and Coro, an artist frightened off by what her own paintings may represent, gets in her car and drives for hours in the middle of the night until she chances upon Betania, an isolated house existing in a world of its own. It's an unfamiliar place inhabited exclusively by women who, strangely, all seem to know her. Like adherents of an ancient cult, the women of Betania all dress the same, carry out strange rites and celebrations, and live alongside goats and innumerable dogs against a landscape dominated by a mountain that seems to block out the sunlight.

Returning to Luma after being promised their records would be wiped clean had been a no-brainer for Harlow and company—especially when the only requirement for hub society reintegration was to meet with Sorceress Rhiannon at the Collective’s Tower to share intel about vampires, ferals, and Lachlan Shade’s potential master plan. Yet within minutes of crossing the veil, Rhiannon postpones their appointment due to a brewing faction war among the sorcerers.

The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of the town’s mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick’s pockets. Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Prosperina and Neftalí—the latter of whom, one of the town’s last literate citizens, hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas.

From award-winning author Tehlor Mejia comes a spine-tingling tale of transformation, mystery, and the monsters we face—inside and out. What big teeth… For twelve-year-old Evan, summertime has always meant carefree days with her family and unlimited time with her best friend, Billie. This...

Twelve-year-old Maia's parents say she's lucky to have smelled the smoke, lucky to have pulled her sister, Amelia, out of their burning house. But is it really "lucky" when Amelia's in the hospital? And is it “lucky" when Maia knows it was her candle that started the fire? When she's sent to spend the summer with her grandparents in Minnesota while her sister heals, Maia discovers that her demons are intent on following her.

The thrilling conclusion to the Los Monstruos trilogy by Diana López that explores the Texas-Mexico border myth of La Lechuza. The magical town of Tres Leches is home to the most feared and revered monstruos of Tejas. It’s where La Llorona haunted the river until her daughter set her free...

"A timely adventure filled with heart, magic, and the power of family." — Claribel A. Ortega, New York Times bestselling author of the Witchlings series A new Latinx middle grade fantasy debut where a secret magical academy, an evil sorcerer, and a powerful, coveted gem awaits one girl in her...