Publishers Weekly
★ 04/15/2024
Fuentes debuts with the astonishing story of two malas, or women who challenge traditional Mexican gender norms. The year is 1951 and Pilar Aguirre, who is eight months pregnant with her second child, has recently joined her husband, Jose Alfredo, in the Texas border town of Barrio Caimanes, where he works as a cowboy. While Pilar is visiting her friend Romi Muñoz, a mysterious older woman shows up and claims to be Jose’s first wife. Soon afterward, Pilar goes into labor and has a stillbirth, which she attributes to a curse put on her by the older woman. A parallel narrative set in 1994 La Cienega, Tex., follows Lucha “Lulu” Muñoz, Romi’s angsty teen granddaughter, who plays in a punk band called Pink Vomit without her father Julio’s knowledge. For his part, Julio worries Lulu will become a mala (“For a Mexican man, a mala is the worst”). After Romi dies in her sleep, Lulu meets Pilar at her grandmother’s funeral. Later, the two become friends and bond over Tejano music, leading to the revelation of family secrets. Fuentes is a seamless storyteller: the narrative is rich in Mexican culture and fully realized characterizations, especially the defiant Lulu and the overbearing Julio. Fans of Ana Castillo and Erika Sanchez will be thrilled. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary Management. (June)
From the Publisher
Malas is an antidote for the hard-line essentialism that has made this world an intolerant, violent place. Fuentes humanizes seemingly insoluble conflicts, both generational and cultural, with imperfect characters who are just doing their best, even when they know they are screwing up. She gives them something that many of us nonfictional people living and messing up in the world could use, and give back — grace.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Malas is a machete: sharp, terrifying, and beautiful. Each character feels dynamic, familiar, and so utterly human in their glorious messiness. Fuentes has achieved something rare and indelible with this story of complex women.”
—Erika L. Sánchez, New York Times bestseller author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter and Crying in the Bathroom
“Fuentes’ propulsive plotting; rich and precise depiction of Tejano culture; complex characters; and thoughtful exploration of female anger, grief and intergenerational trauma combine to form a fully immersive reading experience that—for all its specificity—will be compelling and meaningful to readers of all backgrounds. Brimming with brio, Fuentes’ deliciously defiant debut breathes new life into classic lore and heralds the arrival of a bold new literary powerhouse.”
—BookPage Starred Review
“Fuentes seamlessly knits familiar history and urban legend with a heartfelt, modern, coming of age story to deliver a vivacious, page-turning novel of rebellion and rebirth. The truth, in the hands of Fuentes lively and beautiful prose, liberates these characters and the reader alike.”
—Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming
“Fuentes is a seamless storyteller: the narrative is rich in Mexican culture and fully realized characterizations, especially the defiant Lulu and the overbearing Julio. Fans of Ana Castillo and Erika Sanchez will be thrilled.”
—Publisher's Weekly Starred Review
“Malas ensnares you with its antic energy, vibrant secrets, and the wickedly smart, self-assured Lulu at the center of it all. An enviably electric debut from Marcela Fuentes, who knows in her bones that the bad girls living in family cuentos, in telenovelas, and in town gossip are also the ones that glow with the brightest fire inside.”
—Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences
“Fuentes builds a complex but loving portrait of a community shaken by loss but shaped by fortitude, with two strong-minded women at its heart.”
—Star Tribune
“Fuentes’ stunning debut shows us the sweeping mythic stature of the past alongside and running beneath the tactile and urgent present. Her gifts with storytelling and character propel us naturally from time to time in this gripping narrative of grief and release.”
—Aimee Bender, New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and The Butterfuly Lampshade
“While the sections of the novel set in the ’90s are the liveliest, full of the complicated details of being a teenager pulled by tradition and pop culture, romance and independence, the briefer sections set in the ’50s provide a sense of context and of the differences and similarities between the two young women as Fuentes cunningly reveals the unexpected ties that bind them.
A vibrant portrait of two strong women and their mixed feelings about home.”
—Kirkus Starred Review
“Malas is a marvel. At once epic and intimate, is packed with a cast of unforgettable characters - teenage members of a punk band, frustrated fathers trying to outrun a curse, women whose friendship transcends time and circumstance - all desperate to be seen. And Marcela Fuentes lets us see these characters in all their facets and flaws as we laugh, cry, and live alongside them.”
—Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made
“The next great Texas literary epic…Amid a bumper crop of generation-spanning novels from Texas Latinas, Marcela Fuentes’s unflinching Malas stands out…Lulu, Pilar, and Julio learn many of the facts, but no matter how close any of us are to our families, we’ll never really know what it was like to endure our forebears’ lives. We can record long testimonials and stay up all night trading stories, but that takes us only so far. Our ancestors’ deepest hopes and fears are lost in the space between the lived experience and the tale. That’s what novels are for; that’s what Malas does.”
—Texas Monthly
“Malas gorgeously captures both the vibrancy and the cost of becoming the kind of woman who sets her own path, creates her own rituals, and mourns her own losses. Marcela Fuentes writes with a visceral precision about family, grief, and what it means to move through the world holding on to both your independence and your ties to community. This is a dazzling, heartbreaking, and triumphant debut.”
—Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-04-05
An entrancing debut novel set in a “dinky little border town” on the Texas side of the Rio Grande links the stories of two women, one a young wife and mother in the 1950s and the other a 14-year-old in 1994.
Both are considered malas by those around them, bad girls who are “willful and didn’t listen.” In 1951, Pilar Aguirre, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Mexican man, has moved to the United States with her handsome charro husband, José, and is shocked when an older woman approaches her house saying she herself is José’s wife. The woman puts a curse on Pilar, which seems to come true when two of Pilar and José’s children die. Despite the help provided by her sensible older comadre, Romi, Pilar is unable to cope with her situation. Four decades later, Lulu Muñoz—whose mother died in a motorcycle accident when she was 5—is being raised by a loving but alcoholic father along with her grandmother Romi. Lead singer in a punk band, Lulu is ambivalent about her upcoming quinceañera, with its frills and gaudy ceremony, until she forms a close relationship with the glamorous and mysterious Pilar, who has returned to town after decades away and comes up with a surprising scheme for the party. While the sections of the novel set in the ’90s are the liveliest, full of the complicated details of being a teenager pulled by tradition and pop culture, romance and independence, the briefer sections set in the ’50s provide a sense of context and of the differences and similarities between the two young women as Fuentes cunningly reveals the unexpected ties that bind them.
A vibrant portrait of two strong women and their mixed feelings about home.
