Gary Soto

After unexpectedly falling in love with a "nerdy" boy, fourteen-year-old Marisa works to change her life by transferring to another school, altering some of her behavior, and losing weight.

When Miata leaves on the school bus the skirt that she is to wear in a dance performance, she needs all her wits to get it back without her parents' finding out that she has lost something yet again.

Fourteen-year-old Lincoln Mendoza, an aspiring basketball player, must come to terms with his divided loyalties when he moves from the Hispanic inner city to a white suburban neighborhood.

A senior at East Fresno High School lives on as a ghost after his brutal murder in the restroom of a club where he had gone to dance.

After saving a drowning puppy while dealing with a huge crush on his classmate Sierra, thirteen-year-old Jordan Mendoza nurses the abandoned puppy back to health and wonders who threw her into the canal and if there are more puppies needing rescue.

When nineteen-year-old Eddie drops out of college, he struggles to find a place for himself as a Mexican American living in a violence-infested neighborhood of Fresno, California. A junior college dropout, 19-year-old Eddie is trying to support himself in this story set in the barrio of Fresno, California. Annotation. For Eddie there isn't much to do in his rundown neighborhood but eat, sleep, watch out for drive-bys, and just try to get through each...

Twenty-one poems about growing up in an Hispanic neighborhood, highlighting the delights in such everyday items as sprinklers, the park, the library, and pomegranates.

While helping his father and grandfather work as gardeners in Fresno, California, ten-year-old Rudy sees some differences between his Mexican-American family and the wealthy families that live nearby.

The author recalls his childhood in Fresno, California, in the 1950s and 1960s, recreating the sights, sounds, and smells of his experience in a working-class Mexican-American community.

A collection of short stories about Mexican American youth growing up in California's Central Valley.