Reviews
ONE LAST CHANCE TO LIVE
Publisher’s Weekly
September 2024
A grieving teen from the Bronx turns a class journal into a lifeline in this high-stakes page-turner from Stork (I Am Not Alone). “Half Mexican” 17-year-old Nico, who aspires to become a “great writer,” works at the fish market before school and sells weed for the X-Teca gang. His routines are thrown asunder by an eerie dream about his deceased unrequited love, Puerto Rican-cued Rosario, which seems to prophesize his death, as well as the deaths of his mother and 12-year-old half brother Javier. When his mother is diagnosed with lung cancer and Javier begins his X-Teca initiation, Nico’s dream starts to feel real. In response, he dedicates his AP English journal to investigating how college-bound Rosario-whose writerly ambitions inspired Nico’s future plans-died via a heroin overdose. By understanding Rosario’s life, will Nico be able to save his own? As he works through his unresolved grief and struggles to cope with worsening home dynamics, Nico’s daily writing assignments morph into a “novelesque… journal on steroids” that probes honesty, truth, and a writer’s way of life. Plainly yet piercingly voiced by a complex, flawed protagonist navigating tough choices, this immersive tale concludes with a brief-and powerful-message of hope. Ages 12-up. Agent: Faye Bender, Book Group. (Sept.
Kirkus
August 15, 2024
Nico wants to write his way out of his life, but does he have what it takes?
Seventeen-year-old Nico Kardos wants to be a writer. He also wants to go to Sarah Lawrence College and get away from his Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point, where the girl he’d loved his whole life, Rosario Zamora, died from a heroin overdose six months earlier and where Javier, his younger half brother, is headed for a cruel, hard life in the local gang, the X-Tecas. One night Nico has what he believes to be a prophetic dream about his own death and the deaths of his mom and Javier. In the dream, Rosario appears and says something to him that he can’t recall when he wakes up. When Nico’s mother falls seriously ill just one week later, he wonders whether he can change his future-and whether he wants to. Is he fated to follow in Rosario’s footsteps? In this story that unfolds in the form of journal entries for his AP English class, Nico’s interior monologue feels raw and real, expressed in an authentic, youthful voice. The grittiness of his reality-absent fathers, the need for money, and the desire for bigger things-is at the core of award-winner Stork’s latest. At times the journal entries make narrative jumps that feel jolting, but the novel moves at a quick clip and is hard to put down. All major characters are Latine. An honest, brutal exploration of reality.
Booklist (Starred Review)
September 15, 2024
Like others in Hunts Point in the Bronx, Nico has been mourning the loss of Rosario, his neighbor and an aspiring writer everyone thought would be a star. But his grief has shifted to obsession, preventing him from helping his mother as she succumbs to cancer or his brother as he sinks deeper into gang life. To uncover the secrets surrounding Rosario’s death, Nico dares to seek answers from the seedier elements of Hunts Point at significant threat to those around him. The book follows Nico’s journal entries-ostensibly kept for a writing class-revealing his preoccupation with Rosario is based in the hope they both had to escape to a better life. Even so, he is tough and world-weathered, a junior Philip Marlowe with a knack for knowing the right lies to escape a tight spot. But the biggest threat to finding the truth about Rosario and saving himself may just be his own demons. Stork once again delivers an impactful and ambitious work as he combines his penchant for Latin American narratives with a classic noir detective story. It’s unflinching regarding life’s greater challenges-drugs, sex, and violence are de rigueur in these characters’ lives-but that grittiness is the strength of this engrossing and expertly realized tale.
– Reinhardt Suarez
The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (Starred Review)
October, 2024
Out of the two available writing classes at school, not-yet eighteen-year-old senior Nicolás “Nico” Kardos chooses the class taught by one of the last people to talk to his crush Rosario before she died last year. A daily journaling assignment inspires the epistolary form of this novel and motivates Nico to grieve more honestly in longform while investigating Rosario’s death, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes the people closest to him (i.e., Rosario’s sister and her ex, Nico’s best friend) and despite the official account of an accidental heroin overdose. Nico is a sympathetic narrator, convinced by a vivid dream that he’ll die this summer, and working through complicated feelings about his mother’s declining health from lung cancer and his brother’s involvement in a local gang. The slow burn of an eerie mystery yields more than clues as Nico’s life in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx is continually complicated by family tragedy and poverty, varied awkward relationships with the women in his life, and an often uncomfortable reckoning with his abilities as a writer. Rosario was an enviably talented writer working through a lot that Nico only discovers after the fact, but as the circumstances of her death become clearer, Mexican-American author Stork pens a coming-of-age story especially attuned to finding healing through art. WJ
Shelf Awareness (starred revieww)]
September 20, 2024
One Last Chance to Live by Francisco X. Stork reveals the thoughtful, moving account of a life on the edge through the journal entries of a young man debating whether to follow in the footsteps of his mentor, who was recently found “dead from a heroin overdose in a hotel room in Queens.”
Seventeen-year-old Nico wants to be a great writer, so he signs up for Mr. Cortazar’s English class with the “insane requirement” that he journal “at least five hundred words every single day.” Rosario, the girl he loved and admired, also wanted to be a great writer. Now she’s dead. Nico has dreams of his own funeral, in which his mother, Julia, and brother, Javier, are “previously departed,” and Rosario is trying to tell him something important. Upon waking, Nico becomes increasingly obsessed with whether Rosario, not a known drug user, died “on purpose or by accident.” When his mother is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and Javier falls in deeper with the X-Teca gang, Nico fears his dream was prescient. As his hope for the future wanes, he wonders if this is how Rosario felt right before she died. If so, what’s stopping him from taking the same way out?
Stork’s nuanced dive into suicidal ideation is written in a close, achingly honest voice. The private journal entries are a flowing confessional, and readers witness the toll “the crappy part of living” takes on the young man. Underlying all is the profound and believable hope that Nico will overcome his obstacles and be able to recognize his writing–and his life–for the precious gifts they are.
I Am Not Alone
Kirkus, Starred Review (MAY, 2023): Eighteen-year-old Alberto works hard—earning money as a painter that he sends back to family in Mexico, studying for his high school equivalency certificate, and helping the older sister he lives with care for her baby—all while pursuing his passion for pottery. But he worries about his deteriorating mental health: An aggressive, insulting voice in his head has begun urging him to engage in uncharacteristic violence. Jewish high school senior Grace is at the top of her class. Although she’s planning to attend Princeton and become a doctor, Grace has been questioning everything since her parents’ divorce. She’s drawn to Alberto from the day they meet, and when tragedy strikes and Alberto is accused of killing an elderly client and goes on the run, the pair struggle to figure out what really happened. Alberto’s suspected schizophrenia makes him heartbreakingly susceptible to both the best and worst of humanity; he encounters those who cruelly take advantage of his mental state but experiences extraordinary kindness from Grace’s formerly estranged family members and their rabbi. Told in the teens’ alternating perspectives, the narrative poignantly conveys how compassion and a willingness to overcome the perceived stigma of severe mental illness, together with the appropriate medical attention, can make all the difference.
An illuminatingly powerful story about mental illness, young love, faith, and hope. (author’s note, resources) (Fiction. 14-18)
Booklist (Starred Review)
(Review Date: June 1st)
Eighteen-year-old Alberto is living with his older sister, Lupe, when he first hears a mysterious voice in his head. Soon, it becomes such a fixture that he names it “Captain America,” because “it was not real. It had no power over him.” But of course, it does, as it orders him about, commenting abusively on his life (“You’re worthless”) until it’s hard for Alberto to think and he begins to experience disturbing memory lapses. When Alberto is sent by his sister’s odious boyfriend (also his boss, Wayne) to clean windows at one of Wayne’s tenant’s apartments, he meets beautiful, wealthy Grace; though the two come from very different worlds, they are immediately infatuated. But then Alberto is accused of robbing and murdering Wayne’s elderly aunt, whose house he was painting. Maddeningly, he can’t actually remember the circumstances, questioning if he really might be guilty as he flees from the police and Grace risks everything to help him. Stork (On the Hook, 2021) writes with quiet authority an affecting, deeply emotional story about a beautifully realized, highly empathetic boy dealing with schizophrenia. In an author’s note, he acknowledges his own experiences with an illness similar to Alberto’s. The result is an important book that deserves a wide readership. — Michael Cart
Publisher’s Weekly
June 2, 2023
Stork (On the Hook) interweaves issues of racism, mental health, and classism with a budding romance in this moving read. Teenage Alberto lives with his beloved nephew, his drug-dependent older sister, and her married, physically abusive boyfriend. On top of dealing with his tumultuous homelife and working as a housepainter to help financially support the rest of his family back in Mexico, he must also navigate concerns about his own undocumented status, his undiagnosed learning disability, and a mysterious voice in his head that pressures him to commit violent acts. On a job, he meets Grace, a Princeton hopeful from an affluent Jewish family, who’s drawn to Alberto’s kindness. When Alberto goes on the run after being accused of murdering an elderly client, Grace resolves to help him. But with all the evidence seemingly pointing to Alberto, and Alberto himself experiencing frequent blackouts and doubting his own mind, Grace must enlist the teens’ N.Y.C. community to ensure justice. Straightforward prose and the pair’s alternating perspectives paint an accessible picture of Alberto’s auditory hallucinations (informed by Stork’s own experience, according to an author’s note) and suspected schizophrenia, and Grace’s own doubts regarding her future. While the narrative’s high-stakes conflicts are front and center, it’s the sheer sweetness of Alberto and Grace’s love story that sets the tone of this hopeful read.
The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (Starred Review)
July 10, 2023
Eighteen-year-olds Alberto and Grace both live in Brooklyn, but worlds apart. Undocumented Alberto lives with his sister, taking menials jobs to send money home to Mexico but finding joy in working clay into beautiful pottery, while wealthy Grace is on track for a perfect, successful life (valedictorian, Princeton-bound, adoring boyfriend) in which she finds no joy, making her question her purpose. When their lives cross paths, an unexpected spark leads to an unusual friendship on the brink of something more. Unfortunately, the happy accident of their meeting is marred by the fact that Alberto’s begun to hear a voice in his head, one that may have compelled him to an uncharacteristic act of violence. Now, as Alberto struggles to determine his innocence and fights the seemingly losing battle against the genuinely terrifying voice, he pushes Grace away, while Grace finds herself torn between an unwavering desire to help him and a stymieing fear of upsetting her safe, predictable life. This taut and suspensefully plotted emotional drama offers a nuanced, poignant story of friendship in the face of adversity, and the relationship between Alberto and Grace feels genuine in its development and complexity. Switching perspectives between the two leads, the omniscient third-person narrative effectively places the reader in Alberto’s mind as he fights the onset of schizophrenia yet it doesn’t shortchange Grace’s own struggles. A background cast of worthy supporters, meanwhile, are exemplars of the imperfect-but-trying and prove the value of empathy and effort. The novel offers no simple solutions, but it ends with a formidable hope that can be found in bonds of family, friendship, and love in all its forms. ACM
Shelf Awareness
August, 2023
At the end of The Memory of Light Francisco X. Stork vulnerably revealed his own experiences with depression and suicide. In another intimate author’s note appended to his 10th novel, I Am Not Alone, about an undocumented Mexican teen suspected of murder, Stork writes about his auditory hallucinations caused by bipolar disorder. That sensitive knowledge imbues his dramatic narrative with haunting power.
Eighteen-year-old Alberto’s “mind work[s] slow,” but “slow [is] not the same as dumbass.” He’s employed (at half-wages) by his sister Lupe’s abusive boyfriend, Wayne, doing apartment maintenance. Wayne provides Lupe (and, by default, Alberto) with a place to live, since Wayne is the father of Lupe’s baby. Alberto suspects Lupe is back on drugs.
Alberto isn’t doing well himself. The voice in his head is getting stronger, taunting him with horrible thoughts. He calls the voice Captain America, “like the comic book character. It was not real. It had no power over him.” But sometimes, Alberto blacks out and can’t remember what happened. Captain America insists he killed, then robbed the old lady whose home he was painting. Lupe warns Alberto that the police are looking for him. The only person he can turn to is a girl he recently met–a girl with everything to lose if she helps him.
Stork constructs an intricate hunt for truth through the maze of mental illness. While Alberto’s thrilling “did he or didn’t he?” mystery drives the story, Stork also intertwines crises (and recoveries) of faith, family reunions, a love-story-in-progress, and maybe even a pottery lesson. Stork’s resonating, empathic fiction once again provides audiences with convincing reasons to believe “I am not alone.”
On the Hook
Booklist (Starred Review): After his father’s death and the descent of his brother, Fili, into depression, things are finally looking up for Hector and his family. He has won first place in his school’s essay contest, and even more exciting, his now-recovered brother plans to purchase a new house for his entire family to move out of the projects. Tragedy strikes when Fili is killed by Joey, a classmate of Hector’s who believes that Fili disrespected Joey’s brother by stealing his girlfriend. In retaliation, Hector runs over Joey’s brother, crippling him. Both boys, still minors, are sentenced to mandatory attendance at Furman Academy, a military-style school near San Antonio. Hector vows that Joey will pay for his crime, one way or another. Stork returns to his 2006 novel, Behind the Eyes, and reenvisions it to help young people today “know about the courage of love in a world where hatred is so pervasive.” He absolutely succeeds by focusing on Hector’s choice between embracing revenge and granting forgiveness to move on with his life. Intense, at times brutal, but so vital for today’s polarized society, this book will hopefully encourage readers to have compassion for others, even those with whom they vehemently disagree. — Reinhardt Suarez
Kirkus (Starred Review): Mexican American Hector lives a quiet yet fulfilling life in El Paso, Texas. He’s the star of his high school’s chess team; enjoys spending free time with his best friend, Azi; and just won an essay contest about the pursuit of happiness. But his circumstances begin to shift when Joey, the younger brother of a local gang member and drug dealer, singles Hector out with threats and an act of disturbing violence. Joey’s dangerous fixation on Hector—in addition to a volatile situation involving an ex-girlfriend of Joey’s brother—eventually culminates in a violent collision that costs Hector tremendously. The latter two-thirds of the novel focus on Hector’s and Joey’s time at a reformatory school in San Antonio that they’re both mandated to attend. There, Hector grapples with his chaotic mental state as he fantasizes about enacting revenge on those who wronged him and struggles to adapt to new challenges. Hector is an expertly crafted protagonist, roiling with guilt, grief, and a thirst for violence that threatens to consume him if he doesn’t shift his perspective. What starts as a quiet drama quickly escalates to a potent, fiery story while remaining a deep meditation about cycles of violence.
A staggering and fearless book. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14-18)
Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review): Throughout Stork’s unflinching, fully fleshed out novel centering a 16-year-old chess aficionado turned reformatory school student, his introspective Mexican American protagonist wrestles with an unimaginable question: “How could he live with himself knowing that he let his brother die?” The journey to find an answer forms the bulk of the narrative, examining the weight of guilt, the drive for revenge, and toxic masculinity in fine-point detail. Set in El Paso, Tex., and told in limited third-person perspective, Stork’s narrative introduces readers, before tragedy strikes, to Hector Robles. Hector aspires to achieve grandmaster status before his 18th birthday and to eventually get his family out of public housing. But when classmate Joey zeroes in on Hector for targeted harassment and violence, which escalates to a brutal, tragic confrontation between their families, Hector must decide whether his need for revenge outweighs his desire to heal. From the novel’s first chapter, Stork transmits the emotions “going at it bare-fisted in the boxing ring inside [Hector’s] head” with sensitivity and finesse, laying bare Hector’s complex, dynamic feelings right up until the novel’s cathartic end. Ages 12–up.
Illegal
Booklist (starred review): After taking down a cartel and narrowly escaping by crossing the border from Mexico to the U.S., siblings Sara and Emiliano find themselves in even more danger than they were back home. Sara, a former journalist in Juarez, is in a detention facility, awaiting her asylum hearing. Her younger brother, Emiliano, is in hiding with a most precious cargo, the cell phone of cartel boss Hinojosa, which may contain the contact information of human traffickers based in the U.S. It is a race against time as Sara desperately tries to survive the cruel and inhumane conditions of the facility. Meanwhile, Emiliano must rely on his ingenuity and determination to avoid his pursuers. Picking up where 2017 Disappeared left off, Stork does not miss a beat. This time, Emiliano is the spotlight character, with Sara providing stark interludes inside the detention facility. While Disappeared took pains to illustrate the lives of the poor in Mexico, this throws light on the many experiences of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., from migrants being detained to undocumented workers fearing ICE raids to those who have attained citizenship and have perhaps too easily forgotten the poverty and despair back home. This book will not disappoint as both a thrilling page-turner and as a powerful analysis of injustice happening within America’s borders. — Reinhardt Suarez
Kirkus: Following their escape from the cartels and corrupt local police threatening their lives in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Sara Zapata and her brother, Emiliano, learn that even Los Estados Unidos can’t guarantee their safety.
About 10 days have passed since their fateful trek across the border chronicled in the closing chapters of Disappeared (2017). Held captive at the Fort Stockton Detention Center, Sara awaits the results of her appeal for asylum in the U.S., every day losing more hope among the other women refugees. In the meantime, she must endure the ire of detention center personnel, including an office director with dangerous criminal ties. Unable to continue her investigation of a human trafficking ring with roots in Mexico and the U.S., Sara pins all her hopes on Emiliano, who now holds the all-important cellphone with incriminating data linking the powerful officials and criminals involved in the abduction and captivity of las Desaparecidas. Emiliano, meanwhile, heads off on a harrowing journey of his own, struggling to reconnect with his estranged, Americanized father while striving to elude danger at every corner, including the looming threat of deportation. Switching from third-person narration to a less enthralling first-person alternating narration, this sequel piles on the suspense and twists. Though there is some muddled political commentary, Stork offers a biting indictment of the U.S. government’s immoral apathy to the refugee crisis within its borders. Strong character development, however, reigns supreme.
A brilliant, penetrating follow-up. (Thriller. 12-18)
Horn Book: In this sequel to Disappeared (rev. 9/17), Mexican journalist Sara Zapata is now in the Fort Stockton Detention Center in Texas, lost in a sea of asylum petitions, after she and her brother Emiliano fled Juárez with a cell phone belonging to the head of a drug trafficking ring. While Sara stays to plead for asylum, seventeen-year-old Emiliano proceeds alone to pursue the mysterious Big Shot behind the trafficking ring in the United States. Stork’s suspenseful narrative alternates between Sara’s and Emiliano’s first-person points of view. Both protagonists have a strong inner compass guiding them to do the right thing, and providing a moral center to a tale that incorporates family, immigration, detention centers, human trafficking, and the web of evil that spreads from a city in Mexico right up to the Washington lawyers and government officials who profit from it. The story stands alone, but readers will likely want to read Disappeared for the bigger picture. — DEAN SCHNEIDER
Disappeared
Horn Book (Starred Review): Sara Zapata’s best friend is missing. Kidnapped. Sara, a rising-star reporter at Juárez, Mexico’s El Sol newspaper, is determined to find her and shine a light on the missing and murdered girls in Juárez, the Desaparecidas. Sara tells her boss Felipe, someone has to keep the memory of these girls alive. If we don’tt care about them, then who will? But as she unearths the State Police’s deep connection to sex slavery, she receives a death threat that puts her family in danger. Her younger brother Emiliano is an entrepreneur on the cusp of success; he’s finally making connections to make a better life for their family and be considered worthy of his wealthy girlfriend. Unlike his father, he doesn’t plan to leave his family behind and move to the United States. But when the lines between right and wrong blur, who can you trust? How do you keep your soul while trying to survive? This emotional thriller which takes place over the course of seven harrowing days and includes betrayal, desperate escapes, and a perilous trek across the desert to cross the border into the U.S. tackles these questions and more. In chapters that alternate between Sara’s and Emiliano’s perspectives, Stork beautifully explores the strong ties to one’s home along with the darker pervasiveness of Juárez’s corruption (this city is like a spiderweb. Every thread is connected directly or indirectly to every other thread); the lure of power; and the strength necessary to dream, hope, and make positive change in such crushingly dangerous and difficult circumstances.
Kirkus (Starred Review): Sara Zapata and her brother, Emiliano, do their best to survive with their integrity intact while their beloved Juárez is overrun and endangered by a web of criminals that even involve the police and local government officials. Sara is a journalist who writes about her best friend, Linda, the latest girl kidnapped by the cartels. The heartfelt story sends ripples through the community, and the paper receives grateful letters from the families of other kidnapped girls–and death threats warning her to drop her investigation. Meanwhile, Emiliano is prospering after his foray into petty thefts and subsequent capture ushered him under the wing of Brother Patricio, the leader of his explorer club, the Jiparis, and his soccer coach. Emiliano’s a star soccer player and has started a side business selling some Jiparis’ artisan crafts to shop owners. Despite this, he’s still too poor to date his crush, Perla Rubi, so when he’s tempted into the same web of criminals that are coming after Sara and have taken Linda, the pull of wealth and a future with Perla Rubi is stronger than his need to do the right thing. Stork deftly writes criminals who aren’t monsters but men who do monstrous things, and while his understanding of Emiliano’s coming-of-age is fully engaging, he really impresses with his evocation of Sara’s need to navigate the advances of men she knows and doesn’t know and the powerful women equally dangerous to her. A tense thriller elevated by Stork’s nuanced writing and empathy for every character, including the villains–superb. (Thriller. 12-adult)
Booklist (Starred Review): As a reporter for El Sol newspaper in Juarez, Mexico, Sara tirelessly writes reports on Las Desaparecidas – girls who suddenly vanish from their homes. It’s more than just a job: her best friend, Linda, disappeared several months ago. Meanwhile, her younger brother Emiliano is hard at work earning what he can from small jobs to help support Sara and their mother. When an opportunity arises to increase his family finances, he jumps at the chance, only to find out that his dreams of a better life lay in the town’s most lucrative industry–the drug trade. Both siblings find out how much danger they are in when Sara receives threats on her life that may involve Emiliano’s potential business partners. Together, the siblings flee to safety, toward the U.S. border. The plight of Las Desaparecidas is all too real for girls all over Mexico, and Stork does not shy away from the facts of human trafficking, the drug industry, and the senseless violence that accompanies them. Stork uses parallel storylines to flesh out the two protagonists, and then slowly brings them together to a harrowing climax. Not only does this result in a riveting story, it also highlights the harsh complexity of young Mexicans’ lives. Readers will find this thrilling as well as eye opening. – Reinhardt Suarez
School Library Journal (Starred Review): Gr 8 Up. Sara, a reporter at her Mexican hometown, writes a column in the local newspaper detailing numerous cases of abducted young girls in Ciudad Juarez, including her best friend Linda. When the young woman receives a coded email message hinting at her friend’s whereabouts and captors, she investigates further and discovers how deeply the corruption and criminality runs in her city. Her brother, Emiliano, lives a normal life focusing on soccer, his crush Perla Rubi, and a budding artisanal crafts business. He is determined to rescue his mother and sister from the poverty and dangers around them, leading him to accept a lucrative but illicit business deal. Stork’s use of alternating perspectives provides insight into the siblings’ motivations, and establishes a strong sense of setting as the characters move through a variety of environments. Sara’s thread is fast-paced and thrusts the plot forward, while Emiliano’s moral and emotional struggles provide complexity. Once the siblings flee to the U.S. to save Sara from the criminals she exposes, her story line recedes and Emiliano becomes the focus. This novel touches on themes like the persecution of journalists, political corruption, and cyber investigations. A timely and touching novel that will surely engross fans of true crime stories. This title would be a welcome addition to young adult collections.
—Jessica Agudelo, New York Public Library
Publishers Weekly: Siblings Sara and Emiliano Zapata live in Juárez, Mexico, where crime, kidnapping, and drugs are regular concerns for them. Through her work as a reporter for a local newspaper, Sara writes profiles of the girls who have gone missing, including her best friend Linda, taken four months earlier. It’s her way of letting the world know that she won’t forget Linda or the others. When Sara receives an encrypted email threatening her life, as well as those of her brother and mother, she decides it’s time to find out who has been taking the girls. Meanwhile, Emiliano, who has been working to build a folk art business, is being slowly pulled into the city’s criminal underbelly because of his desire to win over Perla Rubi, the daughter of a wealthy cartel lawyer. Stork (The Memory of Light) crafts a narrative that is both riveting and eye-opening. Part thriller, part sociological study, the novel sheds light on poverty, corruption, and greed while bringing readers intimately close to the plight of those who illegally cross borders with the hope of a brighter future.
Ages 12—up. Agent: Faye Bender, Book Group. (Sept.)
School Library Connection: Stork reveals the underside of Mexican drug cartels and the harsh realities of illegal U.S. border crossings in this terse two-person narrative. Sara, a young Mexican journalist, has worked tirelessly to report on criminal activities in her hometown of Juarez, Mexico. Sara’s younger brother Emiliano, a high school senior, is his school’s soccer star and a budding entrepreneur, selling a friend’s handmade piñatas to tourists. He is also desperately in love with Perla Rubi, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer. When Emiliano is asked to fill the piñatas with drugs headed for the US, he is torn. He has always been incredibly honest, but the lure of wealth to display for Perla’s attention is a heady temptation. When Sara’s best friend disappears, her reporting becomes personal. Many other young women have been kidnapped and forced into prostitution with the full knowledge of government officials. As she continues to expose the criminal element in the corrupt government, she and her family are forced to flee across the US border. As the characters confront desert survival and the terror of being discovered by cartel assassins, as well as the Border Patrol, readers will be kept in page-turning suspense. Themes of honesty, family, love, betrayal and forgiveness are all crafted into this skillful thriller. Schools with large Latino populations may find this of particular interest. Booktalk this spellbinder for maximum exposure.
— Tena Natale Litherland, Retired Librarian, Webb School of Knoxville and
Adjunct Lecturer, University of Tennessee. Highly Recommended
Shelf Awareness: “Maybe in other cities in the world, a young woman can be one hour late and it isn’t a cause for worry. In Juárez, that is simply not possible.” In Juárez, Mexico, the bodies of girls who don’t come home often are found months later. Sara Zapata’s best friend, Linda, went missing four months ago. She’s now one of the Desaparecidas, the Disappeared. Sara is determined not to give up on Linda and uses her position at a local newspaper, El Sol, to tell Linda’s story and the stories of countless other Desaparecidas throughout Juárez. Though Sara has been threatened for her journalism before, she is shaken when the latest threat comes in to her bosses at El Sol: “If you publish anything of Linda Fuentes we will kill your reporter and her family.” For the first time, she realizes her journalism may also put her mother and little brother, Emiliano, in danger. Still, Sara hasn’t published a story about Linda since her first article after Linda’s disappearance. Why would someone threaten her now?
While Sara begins to investigate the threat, Emiliano faces challenges of his own. After a close brush with the law, only Brother Patricio’s intervention saved Emiliano from jail. With Brother Patricio, Emiliano founded the Jiparis, “a Mexican version of the Boy Scouts” and found a way to channel his anger into healthier, more productive outlets. Now Emiliano even has his own business: some of the other Jiparis are talented artists who make crafts that Emiliano sells to local business owners to be resold to tourists, splitting the profits with his craftsmen. He hopes the money he earns can help his family, and also help him finally win over Perla Rubi’s wealthy family. His friends think he’s crazy, but Emiliano knows Perla Rubi cares about him as much as he cares about her. A chance meeting with her father leads to a startling business proposal, but Emiliano isn’t sure he wants to be involved. Still, Mr. Esmeralda reasons, “There’s no way to be successful in Mexico without getting dirty. The best one can do is control the degree of dirt.”
As Emiliano’s fortunes take a turn, Sara’s persecution becomes more real and both siblings face decisions and consequences that will alter their lives forever. Disappeared by Francisco X. Stork (Marcelo in the Real World; The Memory of Light) is a gripping, ripped-from-the-headlines tale of trafficking and the risks one must take to uncover truth. Juárez, alternately glittering and gritty, is “like a spiderweb. Every thread is connected directly or indirectly to every other thread.” Stork makes fantastic use of the tightly-focused perspectives of Emiliano and Sara; as Emiliano tentatively steps into the web and Sara desperately tries to stay out of it, Disappeared will have readers wondering whether either can escape. —Kyla Paterno, former children’s and YA book buyer. Discovery: In Juarez, Mexico, a journalist searching for her missing best friend finds her life threatened while her younger brother learns the cost of joining Juarez’s upper class.
The Memory of Light
Chicago Tribune: If clinical depression is not the same as sadness, then what is it? Francisco X. Stork examines this question with the same grace, eloquence and respect found in all of his writing for young adults, particularly in his previous, much-acclaimed novel “Marcelo in the Real World.” In “The Memory of Light”, he pulls back the curtain on a disease that often feels shameful, as if sufferers themselves are to blame, and gives readers space to consider nonjudgmentally, almost philosophically, both the pain and the wisdom depression can bring. Hospitalized after a suicide attempt, Vicky Cruz has one thing in common with the three other teens in her therapy group. They are, as Vicky puts it, “failures at the thing called living.” Vicky has long defined herself as the opposite of her materially successful family, who set and reach goals with apparent ease. Whereas her father and sister seem to have weathered their grief over Vicky’s mother’s death and moved on, she has stalled. They ask her why she wanted to kill herself; yet, for her, “want” is barely a concept. “I don’t want anything. I simply don’t want.” Under the patient guidance of her doctor, and in conversation with her therapy mates, who gradually become solid friends, Vicky learns that she has depression, but that it doesn’t have to consume her. She starts to feel valued and needed for who she is rather than striving unsuccessfully to fit her father’s blueprint for who she is supposed to be. Emily Dickinson’s image of “boots of lead creaking across her soul” resonates, and she wonders if she, too, “could learn to work with words and images and rhythms so other can see and feel what they could not see or feel or understand before” — in short, what Stork himself does so well.
– Christine Heppermann
(Starred) Kirkus Reviews, November 2015: After a failed suicide attempt, 16-year-old Vicky Cruz wakes up in a hospital’s mental ward, where she must find a path to recovery–and maybe rescue some others. Vicky meets Mona, Gabriel, and E.M.–a clan very different from Vicky primarily because of their economic limitations–at Lakeview Hospital. There, with the guidance of their group-therapy leader, Dr. Desai, they daily delve into deep-seated issues that include anger management, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, and schizophrenia. Beyond the hospital walls, Vicky’s school friends amount to zero, and her future plans are difficult to conjure. Vicky has a flawed family: Becca, her Harvard-student sister, has grown distant; Miguel, her temperamental first-generation father, married Barbara only six months after Vicky’s mother died of cancer; and collectively the two are sending Vicky’s longtime nanny, Juanita, back to Mexico. A quick first-person narration guides readers through the complexity of Vicky’s thoughts and, more importantly, revelations. From her darkest moments to welcome comedic respites to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Stork remains loyal to his characters, their moments of weakness, and their pragmatic views, and he does not shy away from such topics as domestic violence, social-class struggles, theology, and philosophy. Following Schneider Award-winning Marcelo in the Real World (2009), Stork further marks himself as a major voice in teen literature by delivering one of his richest and most emotionally charged novels yet.
(Starred) Booklist, November 2015: When high-school sophomore Vicky Cruz wakes in the hospital psychiatric ward after a failed suicide attempt, she knows it’s only a matter of time before she tries again. She agrees to stay for two weeks, not because she thinks it will change anything, but because she can’t bear pretending anymore. Through Vicky’s interactions with others in group therapy–chatty, energetic Mona; bold, angry E.M.; and preternaturally wise Gabriel–she finds acceptance and understanding, while her sessions with kindly Dr. Desai help re-frame her life from the perspective of someone with an illness that needs treatment, not someone who “isn’t trying hard enough.” The final third of the novel is crowded with less-credible action sequences, including a near drowning and a violent confrontation with an abuser, but overall Vicky’s story has undeniable emotional strength and an encouraging, compassionate message. Stork (Marcelo in the Real World, 2009) writes his characters with authenticity and respect, from their inner lives to their economic and cultural backgrounds (Vicky is Mexican American); as Vicky gradually recovers and begins to imagine her future, other characters work out their damaging assumptions as well. Though occasionally message-heavy, this important story of a teenager learning to live with clinical depression is informative and highly rewarding.
– Krista Hutley
(Starred) Publisher’s Weekly, November 2015: Vicky Cruz, 16, “put[s] on strong every morning,” trying to please her demanding father, a emotionally stunted man who married his assistant shortly after the death of his wife, six years earlier. But when Vicky’s father summarily fires her beloved, arthritic nanny, paying for her to return to Mexico, Vicky surrenders to the “soul pain” she has felt for years and swallows a bottle of her stepmother’s sleeping pills. Stork (Marcelo in the Real World) writes sensitively about Vicky’s journey from near death to shaky recovery, discussing his own experience with depression in an afterword. Awakening in a public hospital’s psych ward, Vicky attends group therapy with patients who have a catalogue of disorders, and learns from them to value her strengths. Various studies have estimated that perhaps as many as one in five teens has a diagnosable mental health problem; it’s a subject that needs the discussion Stork’s potent novel can readily provide. Vicky isn’t healed, but she finds a reason to keep living, and that constitutes progress worth celebrating.
(Starred) School Library Journal, January 2016: After attempting to commit suicide in her bedroom, Vicky Cruz wakes up in the psychiatric wing of the hospital. Exhausted and nearly catatonic, Vicky goes through the motions asked of her by the quiet but firm Dr. Desai while intending to stay only the mandatory time before going home to try again. After attending group therapy with the other three young people on the ward–her energetic roommate Mona, intimidating E.M., and angelic Gabriel, however, Vicky accepts Dr. Desai’s help in convincing her domineering father to let her stay. As Vicky begins intensive treatment, things start to look up, but the looming question of whether she and her friends can survive in the outside world remains. Stork’s latest starts slow, with a cold, dry tone that mirrors Vicky’s own emotional depletion. As the new environment and people begin to reach Vicky, however, the prose follows suit, growing smoothly into a warm and powerful tone. Unlike many novels about teens and suicide, this work focuses entirely on recovery. Vicky is dealing with a deep depression born from her mother’s death and learns not only to name her illness but to cope with the effects and stand up for her needs. Stork’s depiction of depression deftly avoids the traps of preaching or romanticizing and instead is accurate, heartbreaking, and hopeful. A beautiful read that adds essential depth to the discussion of teens and mental illness.
—Amy Diegelman, Vineyard Haven Public Library, MA
“The Memory of Light is filled with hard truths and beautiful revelations. It’s a beacon of hope for those in the dark of depression. This book just might save your life.”
-Stephanie Perkins, New York Times bestselling author of Isla and the Happily Ever After.
“The Memory of Light takes you to that cold strange place that is depression. Vicky’s journey back from darkness doesn’t simplify or sentimentalize the effects of mental illness. Francisco Stork shows us the universe of the human mind, how it can be terrifyingly dark — and how in the company of the right kind heart — infinitely dazzling.”
–Martha Brockenborough, author of the Game of Love and Death
“This is an honest look at recovery, about finding out from rock bottom, and about learning that the process of living with a mental illness is just that: A learning process. A solid, powerful story.”
Kelly Jensen, blogger at Stackedbooks.org
Irises
(Starred) Publisher’s Weekly, November 14, 2011: In this ethically nuanced novel, Stork (Marcelo in the Real World) thrusts a devastating choice on two strong heroines. When their strict minister father dies, two El Paso sisters, 18-year-old Kate, who dreams of going to medical school, and 16-year-old Mary, a talented painter, are left with many painful decisions. At the forefront of their minds are their mother, who has been in a persistent vegetative state for more than two years following a car accident, and their perilous financial situation. Tension escalates when the church plans to evict them, the insurance company denies their father’s policy, and Kate resists pressure to marry her dependable boyfriend. As both sisters change and open up in unexpected ways without their father’s restrictive presence, questions of faith and the girls’ differing beliefs and outlooks provide a powerful theme, further complicated when Kate raises a potentially divisive question: whether to keep their mother on life support. Stork demonstrates his customary skill in creating memorable and multidimensional characters in a story that leaves lingering, contemplative questions regarding death, survival, and love. Agent: Faye Bender Literary Agency. Ages 14—up. (Jan.)
(Recommended) Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books – February 2012 Since the accident that left their mother in a permanent vegetative state, Kate and Mary have suffered without her gentle support and respite from their pastor father’s oppressive rules about how they should dress, talk, and behave. Elder sister Kate has found some escape by depending on her best friend and her boyfriend to get her out of the house, but Mary has resigned herself to caring for her mother at home, her only self-asserting behavior being to claim an extra hour of art-studio time every day after school. When their father dies, the girls are lost at first, and they’re concerned about their financial ability to continue their mother’s care. Kate’s boyfriend proposes, but she finds herself attracted to the new pastor at their church, who introduces some challenges to her ideas of what it means to be selfish, among them the possibility of removing her mother’s feeding tube. The formal, measured diction of the prose reinforces the weightiness of the issues the girls face; it slows the reading down and mimics the girls’ own voices as they gradually awaken from their sheltered past to consider the ethics of their dreams. Kate and Mary are very different: Kate is a strong pragmatist who is extremely rational but feels inadequate in matters of the heart, while Mary is a dreamy artist who leads with her emotions; however, they are both strongly committed to each other and to their principles. Their story is thus a powerfully thoughtful exploration of one of the most serious questions contemporary life throws at us, and it’s made engrossingly messy by the sisters’ differences as well as the fact that their choice will ultimately determine their ability to embark on their own futures. Strong stuff, gently handled. KC
The Last Summer of the Death Warriors
Starred – The Horn Book March/April 2010: Following his breakout book, Marcelo in the Real World (rev. 3/09), Stork offers yet another story with complex characters, rich and powerful themes, and a vivid setting. Tough-guy Pancho Sanchez is a ward of the state of New Mexico: his father died in an accident and his “slow” older sister, Rosa, died in a motel room under mysterious circumstances. Pancho is convinced that she was murdered and lives to take vengeance on his sister’s killer. Pancho is placed first in a foster home and then in an orphanage, where he meets and befriends D.Q., a strange boy with terminal cancer. D.Q. is writing the Death Warrior Manifesto, outlining his philosophy of embracing and loving life. He senses a kindred spirit in Pancho and recruits him to accompany him on an extended trip to Albuquerque for experimental treatment, hoping to mitigate Pancho’s lust for revenge. Once there, Pancho works on tracking down Rosa’s murderer, but he also bonds more closely with D.Q. and Marisol, a girl both Pancho and D.Q. fall for. Ultimately, Pancho needs to decide whether to cling to his desire for vengeance or forsake that quest, embrace forgiveness and acceptance, and move on with his life. Perceptive readers will not fail to recognize the allusions to Don Quixote in this novel of lonely quests and unlikely friendship. Stork’s latest marks him as one of the most promising young adult authors of the new decade; it features unforgettable characters confronting the big philosophical questions in life that will resonate with readers long after book’s end.
Starred – Publishers Weekly February 2010: Characters that are just as fully formed and memorable as in Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World embody this openhearted, sapient novel about finding authentic faith and choosing higher love. Seventeen-year-old Pancho Sanchez is sent to a Catholic orphanage after his father and sister die in the span of a few months. Though the cause of his sister’s death is technically “undetermined,” Pancho plans to kill the man he believes responsible (“How strange that a feeling once so foreign to him now gripped him with such persistence. He could not imagine living without avenging his sister’s death”). When D.Q., a fellow resident dying from brain cancer, asks Pancho to accompany him to Albuquerque for experimental treatments, Pancho agrees–he’ll get paid and it’s where his sister’s killer lives. D.Q. is deeply philosophical, composing a “Death Warrior” manifesto about living purposefully; through him, Pancho gradually opens to a world that he previously approached like a punching bag. Stork weaves racial and familial tension, tentative romances, and themes of responsibility and belief through the story, as the boys unite over the need to determine the course of their lives. Starred — Booklist February 2010 Though the police say that his sister, Rosa, died of natural causes, 17-year-old Pancho Sanchez is convinced she was murdered, and looking to exact revenge. With no surviving family (his mother died when he was five, and his father only three months before Rosa), Pancho is placed in an orphanage in Las Cruces, where he meets D.Q., a boy who is dying from a rare form of brain cancer. D.Q. is not just determined to find a cure, he’s also equally set on training Pancho to become what he calls a “Death Warrior.” Together, the unlikely companions embark on a quest to Albuquerque (Stork acknowledges echoes of Don Quixote here), and though they travel for their own reasons, once arrived, each will have to come to terms with what it might actually mean to be a Death Warrior. Stork (Marcelo in the Real World, 2008) has written another ambitious portrait of a complex teen, one that investigates the large considerations of life and death, love and hate, and faith and doubt. Though the writing occasionally tends toward the didactic, this novel, in the way of the best literary fiction, is an invitation to careful reading that rewards serious analysis and discussion. Thoughtful readers will be delighted by both the challenge and Stork’s respect for their abilities.
Marcelo in the Real World
New York Times May 10, 2009.
Starred — Booklist – April 1, 2009: “Shot with spirituality, laced with love, and fraught with conundrums, this book, like Marcelo himself, surprises.”
Starred — School Library Journal – Mar. 2009: Writing in the first-person narrative, Stork does an amazing job of entering Marcelo’s consciousness and presenting him as a dynamic, sympathetic, and wholly believable character.
Starred — Horn Book March/April, 2009: Seventeen-year-old Marcelo Sandoval marches to the beat of a different drummer – literally. He perceives internal music in his head; he is obsessed with religion; he has difficulty interacting with others – behaviors that place him at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. He is happy at Paterson, the special-education school he’s attended since first grade, and life is comfortable. Then his father proposes an unwelcome deal: if Marcelo proves successful in “the real world” by working in the mailroom at his law firm over the summer he will be allowed to choose between returning to his beloved Paterson or attending – as his father prefers – a regular high school. But as Marcelo begins his summer job, he finds his moral compass tested just as much as his coping and social skills. His loyalty is divided on multiple levels: between his father and the law firm, between a plaintiff and the law firm, between the privileged son of his father’s law partner who befriends him with dubious motives and the beautiful co-worker who gradually comes to care deeply for him. While the voice is reminiscent of the narrator of Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – both have an appealing blend of naivete and wisdom – Marcelo has the superior character development. His inspiring, brave journey into the real world will likely engender a fierce protective instinct in readers, ratcheting up the tension as the plot winds to its sweet, satisfying denouement. It is the rare novel that reaffirms a belief in goodness;rarer still is one that does so this emphatically. j.h.
Starred — Publisher’s Weekly January 2009: Artfully crafted characters form the heart of Stork’s (The Way of the Jaguar) judicious novel. Marcelo Sandoval, a 17-year-old with an Asperger’s-like condition, has arranged a job caring for ponies at his special school’s therapeutic-riding stables. But he is forced to exit his comfort zone when his high-powered father steers Marcelo to work in his law firm’s mailroom (in return, Marcelo can decide whether to stay in special ed, as he prefers, or be mainstreamed for his senior year).Narrating with characteristically flat inflections and frequently forgetting to use the first person, Marcelo manifests his anomalies: heharbors an obsession with religion (he regularly meets with a plainspoken female rabbi, though he’s not Jewish); hears “internal “music; and sleeps in a tree house. Readers enter his private world as he navigates the unfamiliar realm of menial tasks and office politics with the ingenuity of a child, his voice never straying from authenticity even as the summer strips away some of his differences. Stork introduces ethical dilemmas, the possibility of love, and other “real world” conflicts, all the while preserving the integrity of his characterizations and intensifying the novel’s psychological and emotional stakes. Not to be missed. Ages 14-up. (Mar.)
Starred — Kirkus Reviews — Jan 15, 2009: Making good on the promise of his Way of the Jaguar (2000), Stork delivers a powerful tale populated by appealing (and decidedly unappealing) characters and rich in emotional nuance. (Fiction. YA)
My favorite comment on the book: “Sir, on behalf of myself and my twin sons, who are like Marcelo, I want to thank-you for writing this book.”
