~Good Morning America Book Club Pick~

2025 Short-listed, The Mark Twain American Voice Prize in Literature
2025 Finalist, Writers' League of Texas Literary Prize
2025 WILLA Award for Contemporary Fiction/Willa Cather Literary Award
2025 First Novel Prize, Texas Institute of Letters
2024 REFORMA Book Award
2024 Wrangler Award for Outstanding Western Novel
2024 Southwest Book of the Year
2024 Lariat List, Texas Library Association
2024 Finalist, Reading the West Debut Novel of the Year
2024 Longlisted, First Novel Prize, The Center for Fiction

  • “Malas is a marvel. At once epic and intimate, this novel takes us to the border of Mexico and Texas, where teenagers coming of age find themselves unknowingly on a collision course with long held family secrets. Infused with music and startling detail, MALAS is packed with a cast of unforgettable characters - teenage members of a punk band, frustrated fathers trying to outrun a curse, women whose friendship transcends time and circumstance - all desperate to be seen. And Marcela Fuentes lets us see these characters in all their facets and flaws as we laugh, cry, and live alongside them. Full of humanity, heart, and humor, this is a book I will never forget."

    — Vanessa Chan, New York Times bestselling author of The Storm We Made

  • “Malas gorgeously captures both the vibrancy and the cost of becoming the kind of woman who sets her own path, creates her own rituals, and mourns her own losses. Marcela Fuentes writes with a visceral precision about family, grief, and what it means to move through the world holding on to both your independence and your ties to community. This is a dazzling, heartbreaking, and triumphant debut.”

    — Danielle Evans, award-winning author of The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

  • Malas is a machete: sharp, terrifying, and beautiful. Through precise and shimmering prose, Fuentes shows us the myriad ways trauma perpetuates itself in the lives of Brown girls and women. I gasped, laughed, and held my breath. Each character feels dynamic, familiar, and so utterly human in their glorious messiness. Fuentes has achieved something rare and indelible with this story of complex women.

    —Erika L. Sánchez, New York Times bestseller author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter and Crying in the Bathroom

  • Fuentes seamlessly knits familiar history and urban legend with a heartfelt, modern, coming of age story to deliver a vivacious, page-turning novel of rebellion and rebirth. The truth, in the hands of Fuentes lively and beautiful prose, liberates these characters and the reader alike.

    --Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs Last

  • Malas ensnares you with its antic energy, vibrant secrets, and the wickedly smart, self-assured Lulu at the center of it all. An enviably electric debut from Marcela Fuentes, who knows in her bones that the bad girls living in family cuentos, in telenovelas, and in town gossip are also the ones that glow with the brightest fire inside.

    —Manuel Muñoz, MacArthur fellow and author of The Consequences

  • Fuentes’ stunning debut shows us the sweeping mythic stature of the past alongside and running beneath the tactile and urgent present. Her gifts with storytelling and character propel us naturally from time to time in this gripping narrative of grief and release.

    —Aimee Bender, New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and The Butterfly Lampshade

In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguirre in the small boarder town of La Cienega, Texas. The old woman is sure Pilar stole her husband and, in a heated outburst, lays a curse on Pilar and her family.

More than forty years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father’s moods, his rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother passes away, Lulu finds herself drawn to the glamorous stranger who crashed the funeral and who lives alone and shunned on the edge of town.

Their unexpected kinship picks at the secrets of Lulu’s family’s past. As the quinceañera looms—and we move between these two strong, irascible female voices—one woman must make peace with the past, and one girl pushes to embrace her future.

Rich with cinematic details—from dusty rodeos to the excitement of a Selena concert and the comfort of conjunto ballads played at family gatherings—this memorable debut is a love letter to the Tejano culture and community that sustain both of these women as they discover what family means.