Days of the Dead

By the critically acclaimed author of Tyger Tyger, a warm, magical story of a girl’s struggle to keep a promise to her dead mother.

Glorieta Magdalena Davis Espinosa is happy that Papi married Alice. She’s happy that he can smile again after years of mourning Mamá. But the urn containing Mamá’s ashes disappeared into a drawer the day Alice moved in.

If everything about Glorieta’s life is going to change, then she wants one thing to go her way: She wants to hear stories about her mamá when the family gathers on the last night of los Días de los Muertos. And that can only happen if Tia Diosonita will allow Mamá to be buried with the Espinosas in holy ground. If she will allow people to speak Mamá’s name.

With the help of her best friend, River, and her cousin Mateo, Glorieta sets out to convince Diosonita that Mamá is not burning in Hell. To do so, she’ll have to learn to let hate go—and to love the people who stand in her way.

In prose that sparkles with magical undertones, author Kersten Hamilton weaves a tender story about grief, faith, and the redemptive power of love.

Kersten Hamilton was born in a trailer in High Rolls, New Mexico, and has worked as a ranch hand, a lumberjack, a census taker, and an archeological surveyor, and is now a full-time writer. She is the author of several picture books and many novels, including the middle grade Gadgets and Gears series and the critically acclaimed young adult trilogy The Goblin Wars. She splits her time between her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and her farm in Kentucky.