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1 of 1 copy available
Boots Marez is a Latina single mother raising a headstrong and sly eighteen-year-old boy she adopted six years ago. She also runs a school that helps the undocumented people in her politically divided town in Northern California. When her son Jaral is jailed for the murder of one of her former students, her world is turned upside down.
Struggling to protect her son, Boots has to spotlight a community used to living in the shadows, putting her hard work over the years in doubt. Meanwhile, a vicious parents’ board wants to trash her ideals and oust her from the school she helped build. As she faces increasing danger to clear her son’s name, she must decide how far she is willing to go to bring her son home.
But nothing is as it seems—Jaral has been keeping secrets from her after all. And as she puts the missing pieces together, she will discover a deeper and darker web of lies that has been hiding in plain sight.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 10, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781639109685
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781639109685
- File size: 1562 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 29, 2024
Poet Kelson (Flexible Bones, as Maria Melendez) delivers a stirring debut novel about a woman fighting to exonerate her adopted son. In a small town on California’s Humboldt Bay, Boots Marez runs a K–8 school that caters predominantly to undocumented families. Six years ago, she adopted 12-year-old Jaral after seeing his picture in a display at the local library, and—barring some standard adolescent outbursts—she has succeeded in raising him on her own. When Jaral cuts class a few weeks before high school graduation, Boots agrees to delay grounding him so he can “handle” an unspecified “something” that night. The next morning, Jaral calls Boots in a panic to report that his friend, Nando Peregrino, is bleeding out at home. Nando is dead by the time Boots arrives, and Jaral becomes the prime suspect in his murder. Convinced by Jaral’s insistence that he found Nando after he’d been wounded, Boots launches an investigation in hopes of clearing her son’s name; meanwhile, she fends off hostile parents trying to oust her from the school she helped create. Kelson loads the plot with satisfying twists, and the aching, memorably sketched relationship between Boots and Jaral heightens the drama. This bodes well for Kelson’s future in fiction. -
August 1, 2024
Ana "Boots" Marez is a single mom, school administrator, and fierce advocate for immigrant families in this kinetic debut thriller. Her adopted son Jaral is a high-school senior on the cusp of graduation, despite his recent detour into misconduct. Ana's similarly troubled adolescence affords her a greater understanding of her son but forces her to constrain a short temper and impulsiveness. After receiving an alarming call from Jaral, she rushes to his location, where she discovers the gruesome murder of his close friend. Fearing that her son will be falsely accused, she tries to find him ahead of the police. When he is arrested for the crime as she predicted, Ana dons the cape of a "super mom" who will stop at nothing to prove her son's innocence. The novel careens into cinematic mode as Ana embarks on a series of exploits that would test any seasoned action hero. Fast-paced and propulsive, Kelson's novel is a serviceable thriller filled with culturally relevant and timely themes.COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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