It's official: The Knife and the Butterfly is OUT IN THE WORLD. Ask for it in your local bookstore, request it from your library, or order it online. If you read it and love it, consider these (mostly serious) suggestions for helping to get the word out about a book you love.

Today I'm trying out my divisibility suit, which allows me to be in three places at once. So I'm at YA Outside the Lines talking about the things Azael carries, I'm here at I Read Banned Books explaining how TK&TB was inspired by·the students I never got to teach, but I'm also right here at home, serving up the acknowledgments page of The Knife and the Butterfly in light of its release:

Welcome to Day 2 of the The Knife and the Butterfly blog tour! Today I'm over at Reading in Color, hosted by Ari. (Watch out, y'all, this gal is going places, starting with college next fall. She was the first to mention What Can't Wait online, and I'll never forget the jolt that gave me. Someone is talking about wanting to read my book!) I share the first chapter and a few reassuring words about stereotypes and their fate in the pages of The Knife and the Butterfly. For example...

In the first chapter, I wanted to throw down the gauntlet—no easing the reader into Azael’s world. But don’t worry: it’s not all gangs and violence. And in fact, if I let Azael’s bravado come on full force here—he definitely thinks he is one macho badass—it’s precisely so that the reader can see that stereotype undo itself in the rest of the novel.

Read the rest of the post here.

Today is Day 1 of my blog tour for The Knife and the Butterfly. Yay! I'm over at Forever Young Adult with an excerpt, a quiz, and the snarky scoop on why The Knife and the Butterfly doesn't need a glossary. Check out Erin of FYA's gorgeous (and funny) review of The Knife and the Butterfly and comment for a chance to win your very own hardbound copy.

My favorite part from Erin's introduction to the FYA post: 

I reviewed The Knife and the Butterfly on Friday (and if you haven’t read my review and commented, therefore entering yourself in a drawing to receive a free copy of the book, you are dumb. Go do that!), and I had to struggle not to turn the entire review into just a .gif of Lisa Frank unicorns bearing champ cans with Handel’s Messiah playing in the background and Paula Deen popping up to say, “JUST READ IT, Y’ALL!” because THAT IS HOW MUCH I LOVED THIS BOOK.

You know, I'm a sucker for affirmation. Here's a bit from MY part of the post:

Whatever your level of Spanish, you really don’t need a glossary to read The Knife and the Butterfly. All you need is a big appetite for a story that will take you into dark places and show you a good dose of light, too.

Read the whole thing here.

There is an explosion in my new (third) novel. How do I write it?

It's strange the things we manage to draw on when we're writing. I reckon that the shock I felt when I had a small-scale kitchen explosion didn't measure up to what explosion victims and survivors experienced. But. It's a starting place.

For me, sometimes the best thing when it comes to bringing a scene to life is finding some kernel in my own life that I can write out of, no matter how much I may need to magnify, distort, or otherwise alter the experience.

It's mostly about finding a way to capture an emotional truth, something that feels truly lived and therefore resonates with the reader.

There are a couple of scenes in The Knife and the Butterfly, for example, that I wrote out of memories of being awake after everyone else in a house had gone to sleep. One finds Azael sitting in the bathroom of an abandoned apartment, contemplating a message scrawled inside a cabinet.

Probably it doesn't matter to anyone else how I imagined my way into this scene, but for me finding that link between my life and a character's life is everything. To get Azael to think thoughts he can only have when he feels cut off from the world, I summoned that sense of unbearable silence in my grandparents' house when everyone was asleep. I craved noise--any noise. Movement--any movement.

Maybe my kitchen explosion will be enough to help me tuck myself into my characters' experiences.

I know, isn't it gorgeous? And when you read The Knife and the Butterfly in February of 2012, you'll see just how perfectly the cover fits the novel. Knife... or butterfly? It's all in how you look at things.

Here's the copy from the jacket:

Azael Arevalo wishes he could remember how the fight ended. He knows his MS13 boys faced off with some punks from Crazy Crew. He can picture the bats, the bricks, the chains. A knife. But he can’t remember anything between that moment and when he woke behind bars. Azael knows jails, and something isn’t right about this lockup. No phone call. No lawyer. No news about his brother or his homies. The only thing they make him do is watch some white girl in some cell. Watch her and try to remember.

Lexi Allen would love to forget the fight, would love for it to disappear back into the Xanax fog it came from. And her mother and her lawyer hope she chooses not to remember too much about the brawl—at least when it’s time to testify. Lexi knows that there’s more at stake in her trial than her life alone, though. She’s connected to him, and he needs the truth. The knife cut, but somehow it also connected.

Read an excerpt of The Knife and the Butterfly here. If you are a teacher, librarian, bookstore employee, book blogger, or otherwise credentialed, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to find out about getting an e-galley. Or create a netgalley.com account and request access from my publisher.

Mad props to the Carolrhoda Lab editorial and design team (and especially my editor, Andrew). Yup, they're rockstars.