National Hispanic Heritage Month (SCPL)

Harlem. Ever since her body grew into curves, Xiomara Batista has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. She pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers-- especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. Mami is determined to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, and Xiomara understands...

"Though they are as different as night and day, Indiana and Amanda Jackson have always shared a strong, mother-daughter bond. Beautiful and free-spirited, Indiana is a holistic healer. Teenage Amanda is a natural sleuth fascinated by the dark side of human nature--like her father, the SFPD's deputy chief of homicide. She also loves playing Ripper, an online mystery game. When a serial killer strikes San Francisco, the young amateur detective plunges...

"It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found dead near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their death as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows of Las...

"From award-winning actress and political activist America Ferrera comes a vibrant and varied collection of first person accounts from prominent figures about the experience of growing up between cultures. America Ferrera has always felt wholly American, and yet, her identity is inextricably linked to her parents' homeland and Honduran culture. Speaking Spanish at home, having Saturday-morning-salsa-dance-parties in the kitchen, and eating tamales...

The popular LGBTQ advice columnist and writer presents a memoir-in-essays chronicling his journey growing up as a queer, mixed-race kid in America's heartland to becoming the "Chicano Carrie Bradshaw" of his generation.

"From the acclaimed author Brownsville and Amigoland--a stunning and timely new novel about a Mexican-American family in a Texas border town who reluctantly become involved in smuggling immigrants into the United States. Brownsville, Texas, has a dangerous reputation: it sits on the U.S. side of the bridge into Matamoros, Mexico, a city controlled by notorious cartels. But that isn't why 12-year-old Orly doesn't want to visit. Though he's still grieving...

During her family's annual car trip from Chicago to Mexico City, Lala Reyes listens to stories about her family, including her grandmother, the descendant of famous shawl makers, one of which has come into Lala's possession.

"Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn't matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year's Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything...

Rendered the subject of tabloid gossip by a messy public breakup, soap star Jasmine takes a part in a new bilingual comedy at the side of a telenovela costar who would revitalize his career.

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the fukú--the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents,...