The Making of Yolanda La Bruja

Common Sense Media Selection for Teens
Booklist Best of the Year
NYPL Top 10 of the Year
HipLatina Best of the Year

Elizabeth Acevedo has said that reading Lorraine Avila feels like an “UPPERCUT to the senses.” You’ve never encountered an author with prose of this sensitivity and fire.

Yolanda Alvarez is having a good year. She’s starting to feel at home at Julia De Burgos High, her school in the Bronx. She has her best friend Victory, and maybe something with José, a senior boy she’s getting to know. She’s confident her initiation into her family’s bruja tradition will happen soon.

But then a white boy, the son of a politician, appears at Julia De Burgos High, and his vibes are off. And Yolanda’s initiation begins with a series of troubling visions of the violence this boy threatens. How can Yolanda protect her community, in a world that doesn’t listen? Only with the wisdom and love of her family, friends, and community—and the Bruja Diosas, her ancestors and guides.

The Making of Yolanda la Bruja is the book this country, struggling with the plague of gun violence, so desperately needs, but which few could write. Here Lorraine Avila brings a story born from the intersection of race, justice, education, and spirituality that will capture readers everywhere.