Agent: DongWon Song, Howard Morhaim Literary. From award-winning author Mark Oshiro comes a powerful coming-of-age fantasy novel about finding home and falling in love amidst the dangers of a desert where stories come to life Xochitl is destined to wander the desert alone, speaking her troubled villages stories into its arid winds. 2023 - From Mark Oshiro, award-winning author of The Insiders, this time-bending adventure is perfect for fans of Sal and Gabi. When they are not writing, they are busy trying to fulfill their lifelong goal of petting every dog in the world. While not always deft in handling complex moral territory, this ambitious, organically Spanish-studded examination of trauma stays adventurous and accessible, resulting in a grace-filled, loving declaration of human value and worth. Mark Oshiro is the award-winning author of the YA books Anger Is a Gift and Each of Us a Desert. In a storyteller’s cadences, #OwnVoices author Oshiro ( Anger Is a Gift) maps a sincere journey through nuanced struggles: the weight of pain, how hope and complicity feed immigrant exploitation, and breaking flawed social cycles. But the warlord’s daughter enlists Xochitl’s help to return her home, where another cuentista can dispatch Xochitl’s powers-a journey through shining and ruined desert cities, shape-shifting beasts, hidden poetry, and an ever-unfolding, uncomfortable truth. When a roaming warlord plots massacre in Empalme, she breaks a cuentista’s strictest law-to magically forget confessions-and runs. As cuentista, restless Xochitl, 16, takes the village of Empalme’s confessions and spills them to the desert and Solís, the departed sun god who scorched the earth in punishment generations ago. MARK OSHIRO is the award-winning Latinx queer author of Anger Is a Gift, Each of Us a Desert, as well as their middle grade books The Insiders and You Only Live Once, David Bravo. Honesty, the weight of caregiving, and the space between absolution and compassion span deserts in this tender, postapocalyptic Latinx fantasy.

Each of Us a Desert by Mark Oshiro