| what worked for me personally | what didn’t work for me personally |
| Santa Muerte being mentioned in a popular YA novel, especially since she is a goddess who looks out for queer people and this is a novel containing several of them | Santa Muerte, a deity I know about through various intersectional occult and witchcraft communities I am personally a part of, being a fictional character in a popular YA fantasy novel. |
| I enjoyed the slow burn of Yadriel and Julian’s relationship. | |
| I think the author did a great job depicting a wholesome and common group of teens. | I prefer reading about less wholesome teens who are more like how I and my friends were like in high school. |
| Maritza’s constant presence in Yadriel’s daily life was a subtle but deeply normalizing and realistic depiction of what many lives of teenagers are like. | |
| I love magical realism, fabulism, fantasy lite, and all of the genres that mix magic or magick with contemporary life, so this was in the exact correct subgenre combo for me. | It seemed extremely slow with a lot of build-up to an ending that felt suddenly fantastical after pages of contemporary. |
| I just love, love, love reading stories about queer people that are meant for rep, visibility, validation, as well as lessons in empathy and understanding. | |
| I think the author did a brilliant job combining Yadriel’s external and internal struggles about gender and magic identity and I love how the author laced that together with the romance by having Julian challenge Yadriel’s thoughts in healthy ways. | |
| I learned a bit about the Latinx community as a whole, whereas prior I had only known things about individual Latinx cultures. | |
| I appreciated how the author showed us complete acceptance of Yadriel’s transness through his relationship with his mother, to ensure the reader is aware that just because Yadriel feels or even might be rejected by the rest of his family, that behavior is not correct, and Yadriel’s mother showed us early on that Yadriel’s gender identity is valid. | |
| I appreciated the way the author challenged readers’ prejudices against Latinx kids by showing a spectrum of different kids, lives, and experiences, but also normalized that, yes, some Latinx kids might happen to reflect a stereotype, and that’s okay but it’s not the absolute norm. | |
| I found it hard to follow information about Yadriel’s family and was extremely confused about the event with the first uncle. | |
| I love that we get told Yadriel and Julian’s sun signs! I love that even though Yadriel doesn’t believe in astrology, the author basically verified astrology by making Maritza’s guess about Julian’s sign correct. 😏 | I cringed so hard when Yadriel talked shit on astrology, but my cringe was in a playful way. |
I’m giving it ⭐⭐⭐⭐. Add it to your TBR?
wish fulfillment 