<P><B>Michelle Ruiz Keil's #OwnVoices debut is a literary YA fantasy about love found family and healing—an ode to post-punk San Francisco through the eyes of a Mexican American girl.</B></P><P>Seventeen-year-old Xochi is on her own in San Francisco running from a painful past. On a visit to Golden Gate Park she meets Pallas a precocious twelve-year-old with a rockstar family that lives in one of the city's storybook Victorian mansions. Xochi accepts a position as Pallas's live-in governess and quickly becomes part of the band's household fascinated by their free-love philosophy and the happy calm that balances out their glamorous music personas.</P><P>But on the night of the Vernal Equinox as a concert afterparty rages in the house below Xochi and Pallas perform a pagan ritual that unintentionally summons a pair of ancient creatures devoted to righting the wrongs of Xochi's adolescence. She'd do anything to preserve her new life but the nightmares of her past are never far behind: the mother who abandoned her the man who betrayed her and the loving grandmother whose death left Xochi alone in the world.</P><P>With the creatures determined to exact vengeance on those who've hurt her no one in Xochi's life is safe—not the family she's chosen nor the one she left behind.</P>
