Luz

Alma Cruz wishes her willful teenage daughter, Luz, could know the truth about her past, but there are things Luz can never know about the journey Alma took to the US to find her missing father.

In 2000—three years after the disappearance of her father, who left Oaxaca to work on farms in California—Alma sets out on a perilous trek north with her sister, Rosa. What happens once she reaches the US is a journey from despair to hope.

Timeless in its depiction of the depths of family devotion and the blaze of first love, Luz conveys, with compassion and insight, the plight of those desperate to cross the US border.


Genre: Literary Fiction

"Luz is a deeply generous novel, steeped with compassion, [and] written with an open, observant heart. Our narrator, Alma, is enamored with math, and this book becomes a beautiful equation in itself?pain and hope and love adding up to a timely, magnificent story." - Gayle Brandeis

"Debra Thomas has written a novel of beauty and the nobility of the human spirit in the face of brutality and overwhelming odds. It’s an adventure as well, full of vivid characters, most notably Alma Cruz, as wise and courageous a heroine as you’ll find anywhere in literature. Luz is a story we need to read now more than ever." - Elizabeth McKenzie