It was tough choosing which of my Tu Books fall titles to share with you this week, as they’re both awesome, and they’re both diverse titles that I want all the world to know about. I had to draw straws, in the end, and Summer of the Mariposas won. This time.

Guadalupe Garcia McCall is known best for her debut novel in verse, Under the Mesquite, which was a finalist for a Morris Award—given for a debut novel—and which won the Pura Belpre Award. McCall carries that same poetic voice to prose in her second novel, a retelling of The Odyssey starring five sisters. I sometimes like to call it a Mexican American Weekend at Bernie’s meets Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants via The Odyssey. Let me tell you why.

When Odilia and her four sisters discover a dead man floating in their swimming hole on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, their first instinct is to report the dead body to the authorities. But when one of the sisters, Juanita, finds a family photo in the dead man’s wallet, their path is clinched—he was a father with two small children at home. They decide they will return the dead man to his family in Mexico, despite Odilia’s opposition to this plan. Eventually Odilia is overruled and she joins them on the urging of the ghostly legend La Llorona, who tells Odilia that this quest is something the five sisters must undertake. La Llorona will be their guide. They pile into their father’s old car and set off on an adventure to Mexico.

While returning the dead man to his family doesn’t come without its disappointments, the most challenging portion of their trip comes on their attempt to return home to their mother, when they must defeat a witch, a nagual (warlock), a chupacabras, and a coven of lechuzas while navigating the desert of northern Mexico on foot. Can the Cinco Hermanitas truly stay “together forever, no matter what” through these challenges? Can they face the ultimate real-world challenge once they make it home, where La Llorona and other magical means can no longer assist them?

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This can be especially tough in fantasy literature, because magic can so often solve problems in ways that can’t be solved in the real world. Author Kristin Cashore faced this situation in her first book, Graceling. (Warning, spoilers ahead; the book has been out for several years at this point, though.) A character is injured in a way that we learn in this world is irreversible. It’s devastating. It changes his life forever. Yet somehow, magically, a solution is found for this injury.

Kristin wrote a note in the third book in the series, Bitterblue, that discusses how readers reacted to this, and how she handled it. Her process in acknowledging her mistake and in trying to right it is an example for all of us.

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I first read Kara Dalkey’s Little Sister in college. As I discussed in my last post, I grew up on a farm, in an area of rural western Illinois that had very little diversity. You could say that my ignorance on diversity issues was pretty high, notwithstanding my desire to be Japanese in the fourth grade. But in college, I had a lot of roommates from different cultures—over the years, roughly twenty women from a variety of other countries, including Laos, Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Belgium, Japan, and the UK. (I feel like I’m forgetting someone.) I also roomed with several African American and Asian American women. (I had a LOT of roommates in college and grad school.) So their influence on me as friends started seeping into the books I looked for.

As a girl in the Japanese imperial court of the 1200s, Mitsuko is shielded from reality. But when her brother-in-law is murdered, and her family taken away by a warlord, she summons the courage to venture into the netherworld. The spirit of Mitsuko’s beloved sister, still devastated by the loss of her husband, wanders between Life and Death. In order to bring her sister back, Mitsuko, with the help of Goranu, a shape-shifter, must battle the merciless spirits—to the death.

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I grew up outside a small town in Illinois, on a small farm where we raised horses, pigs, cows, and rabbits (which were my 4-H project). We were pretty poor, but we also made do with a huge garden and clothes from yard sales and generally living off the land. I loved being involved in 4-H and FFA.

My first major in college was actually animal science pre-vet. I wanted to be an equine veterinarian. What else would a girl who grew up on a horse and pig farm want to do? But I worked my way through college in publishing jobs, first because they were “easy” jobs—not as much physical labor as working on the dairy farm at school, and not as many allergic reactions, either—and then because my experience and skills kept leading me to more jobs in the same field. I typeset college textbooks in Unix/LaTeX, I reported and took pictures for a local newspaper, I edited phone books—yes, phone books—I transcribed 19th-century journals and proofread them.

Eventually, after changing my major and floundering with a human development and family studies major (I loved the child development classes, but didn’t like any of the expected career tracks from the major), I realized in the midst of an elective children’s literature class that I could combine my work skills and my interests. It only took me about six years of undergrad to figure out what I wanted to do.

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