I was teaching eighth grade English Language Arts at a school with a high population of students of Latin American descent. One day, one of my students asked me why we never read books with students that looked like her and her classmates. I decided to write a book for her, and her classmates, and my younger self, and my best friend, for anyone who wants to read a story from a place that feels familiar. That doesn’t mean you aren’t welcome to the pages if you don’t come from that background, but the impetus was to build a story that would feel like home for so many of us that have been on the outside of literature peeking in.