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Luz
Alma wishes her willful teenage daughter, Luz, could know the truth about her past, but her story holds secrets Luz can never know about the journey Alma took to the US to find her missing father.
Alma’s father knows her better than anyone else, encouraging her love of math and her dreams of becoming a teacher, so when he disappears in 1997 after leaving Oaxaca to work on farms in California, a part of her is lost as well. After three years of poverty, Alma and her sister Rosa set out on a perilous trek north to find their father. Along the way, they meet a young man from Guatemala, Manuel, who joins them on their journey and with whom Alma falls in love. Together they continue north, encountering both kindness and profound cruelty.
What happens once Alma reaches the US is a journey from despair to hope. A connection to her father’s past, the truth about a hidden letter, and her determined search to find farmworker-champion Dolores Huerta help Alma move forward as she finds answers and gains the strength to begin a new life in Los Angeles.
Timeless in its depiction of the depths of family devotion and the blaze of first love, Luz conveys, with compassion and insight, the plight of those desperate to cross the US border.
Publisher: She Writes Press (June 9,2020)
ISBN-13 : 978-1631528705
For more information: pdf-press-kit-luz-by-debra-thomas
Praise for Luz
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author of The Ultraviolet Sky, winner of the American Book Award, and most recently, Song of the Golden Scorpion
"This is a novel of great tenderness and great brutality―Debra is right inside of her characters’ minds, bodies, spirits, their souls, and doesn’t spare the reader either tenderness or brutality."
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author of Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., and It Calls You Back: An Odyssey of Love, Addiction, Revolutions & Healing
“Debra Thomas has deftly interwoven the horrors and indignities, as well as triumphs, of the harrowing journey of Mexicans and Central Americans to the United States, ‘bringing to light’ the commonalities of what by appearances are insurmountable differences. With love there are no borders.”
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author of The Book of Dead Birds, winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement
“Luz is a deeply generous novel, steeped with compassion, written with an open, observant heart. Our narrator, Alma, is enamored with math, and this book becomes a beautiful equation in itself―pain and hope and love adding up to a timely, magnificent story.”
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author of The Portable Veblen
“Debra Thomas has written a novel of beauty and the nobility of the human spirit in the face of brutality and overwhelming odds. It’s an adventure as well, full of vivid characters, most notably Alma Cruz, as wise and courageous a heroine as you’ll find anywhere in literature. Luz is a story we need to read now more than ever.”
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"An earnest novel about the journey of a young Mexican immigrant. . . A sensitive but unsparing coming-of-age drama."
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Next Generation Indie Book Awards Judge
"This reader was mesmerized by the depth of pain and love that guides this story along the trail of Alma's fearful journey to her hopes for her daughter."
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Immigrant Rights Activist, Founder of Jovenes, Inc.
Your novel is our platform to have a voice that has the power to soften hearts to understand the suffering of migrants and the current evil system that must be reformed.
