Monarchs in the Wild

The traumatic loss of a classmate has unprecedented ripple effects in one 17-year-old’s life and hometown in Moya’s propulsive debut. In 1994 La Sombra, Calif., high school senior Cal Garcia witnesses valedictorian Nora fall from a bridge onto steel train tracks. The event rattles residents and exacerbates Cal’s feeling of being an outsider among his peers, especially when he’s implicated as a suspect in her death. Support from his Mexican immigrant parents is scarce: while his mother turns to her evangelical church community for guidance, his father has been absent since an incident years prior that left Cal physically and emotionally scarred. Yearning for freedom, Cal purchases a used Mustang. Yet as he fixes it up into a reliable means of escape, the vehicle delivers more complications than he bargained for, ushering Cal into a widening circle of encounters, including with two troublemaking teens, a slippery mechanic, and a reclusive elder. When longtime workers are replaced with temps at Cal’s supermarket job, an employee’s desperate retaliation further shakes the community and forces Cal to examine his own place within it. Questions of family, religious faith, and belonging drive a complex and moving coming-of-age that’s distinguished by vividly drawn characters and kinetic prose. Ages 13–17. (June)