Discovering new authors: Brooklyn Brujas

 

One of the cool things about using the Libby library app is how it suggests books and authors for you once it gets to know what you're looking for. Because it's Hispanic Heritage Month, more Latinx authors have been suggested on the app than normal, and I decided to try "Labyrinth Lost" by Zoraida Córdova.  It is book one in the Brooklyn Brujas three-book series. I totally enjoyed the story. I was so immersed in it, it felt real to me, the way I was immersed in the Harry Potter books when I read them. I wanted to know more about that world and the mythos that Alex and her sisters and the rest of her family inhabits. I found myself looking up prexes (bruja/o rosaries) and wanting to learn more about Los Lagos.

Just to give you a little taste of what it's about, Alex, or Alejandra, is the middle child of three daughters in a family with a bruja/brujo heritage that goes back generations. Her father disappeared when they were kids and her mom has had to work two jobs to keep everything together AND pay the mortgage, while also attending her bruja circle and keeping up her faith and trying to keep her daughters in the faith. For Córdova is very good at showing how this is a very real faith and a real subculture within the Latinx culture. But Alex doesn't think she believes anymore. She is in track at her high school, where she is a sophomore, has a best friend, Rishi (East Indian), she hangs out with (and has never told about her family's magic status), and just wants to be a normal girl. If she could, she'd give up any claim to magic. But, if that really happened, there'd be no need for a story, right?

The story touches a lot of different areas of interest, from magic, teen angst and rebellion to LGBTQ romance, heroine's quest, and dark fantasy themes. Córdova does a very good job of showing the awkwardness, tenderness, and confusion of first love, as well as the misunderstandings and quibbling of sibling relationships.

I highly recommend this for your next read. I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Almarie Guerra, and a delight to listen to. I look forward to listening to the next two books in the series, and even looking up other books by Córdova. I think this is a great story to read during October for Halloween and Day of the Dead, and of course during the rest of Hispanic Heritage Month.