What Can't Wait

Seventeen-year-old Marisa Moreno has smarts and plenty of promise, but she’s marooned in a broken-down Houston neighborhood—and in a Mexican immigrant family where making ends meet matters more than making it to college. When her home life becomes unbearable, Marisa looks for comfort in a dangerous place, and suddenly neither her best friend nor her boyfriend can get through to her. Because she has a secret that makes it impossible to walk through the crowded school halls without cringing, a secret that will grow darker until she faces it.

Read the first chapters of What Can't Wait here.

The Knife and the Butterfly

My latest novel follows two teenagers through the aftermath of a deadly gang fight in a Houston park. There’s Lexi, a troubled girl from a working class background who hangs with a street gang for protection. And there’s Azael, a romantic drifter essentially orphaned by his mom’s death and his father’s deportation to El Salvador. Both Lexi and Azael live in a violent world governed by complex loyalties that land them in deeper trouble than they ever imagined possible. After the gang fight, they each seek the truth of what happened on that sultry summer day, and that truth eventually draws them together in a surprising yet powerful way.

Read the first chunk of The Knife and the Butterfly here.