Magic City, a guest post by R. M. Romero

Miami is a chapter from a novel masquerading as a place. French chateaus exist alongside Cuban restaurants and art deco buildings. Our wild life consists of peacocks, an abundance of stray cats, alligators, and a pair of lemurs owned by a man in my neighborhood. 55 degrees is considered bitterly cold; 80 is the average. 

Miami parties like it knows we’re living at the end of the world. Graffiti is an art form and developers build million dollar condos that will sink into the sea in a matter of decades. The king of fashion, Versace, was murdered on a sunny morning here; Al Capone died in obscurity a few miles away. Our governor keeps trying to ban anything related to queerness even as our mayor paints defiant rainbows on the sidewalks. 

Miami is a city of exiles. Most of the people who live here were born outside of the US. It’s also a minority-majority city: 73% of the population is Latine, 14% is Black, and 13% is white. So you’re just as likely to hear Spanish and French Creole as you are to hear English at the grocery store. And, mercifully, no one ever mispronounces my last name. 

Miami is magic. Hurricanes have a habit of abruptly veering around the city, perhaps thanks to the Santeria practitioners who appear on the streets in their white robes whenever a storm begins to approach us. 

Miami is unreal. That’s why it was the inspiration for in my newest YA novel, Death’s Country.

My protagonists, Andres and Renee, are very much Miami kids. They’re bilingual or even trilingual, artistic, queer, Latine, and practice magic they learned from their ancestors. That magic is the magic of respect and equal exchanges. They’re just as likely to pray to Gabriel the archangel as they are to make offerings to Oja, the Orisha of storms and cemetery gates.  

Even the underworld Andres and Renee visit reflects the diverse landscape they come from. Dante’s dark woods are the banyan forests of South Florida; the City of the Dead is encased in the bones of an alligator and pieced together from different eras in history and different cultures. Andres and Renee accept all of this, because in some ways, the strange afterlife they enter feels familiar.  

Miami is not the norm; neither is having Latine teens as the heroes of a fantasy novel. But the lives (and deaths) of the protagonists of Death’s Country are the norm for some people—myself included. And I wanted to bring that to the page so that kids in my part of the world could see themselves, their home, and their unique struggles in a story. 

We all have our own myths about our lives, and the places and people we love. Why not tell them?

Meet the author

R. M. Romero (she/they) is a Jewish Latina and award winning, international bestselling author of fairy tales for children and adults. She lives in Miami Beach with her cat, Robin Goodfellow, and spends her summers helping to maintain Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Death’s Country is her newest YA novel. 

https://www.rmromero.com/

https://www.facebook.com/RMRomeroAuthor/

https://www.instagram.com/rmromeroauthor

@rmromeroauthor

About Death’s Country

Lakelore meets “Orpheus and Eurydice” when two Miami teens travel to the underworld to retrieve their girlfriend’s soul.

Andres Santos of São Paulo was all swinging fists and firecracker fury, a foot soldier in the war between his parents, until he drowned in the Tietê River… and made a bargain with Death for a new life. A year later, his parents have relocated the family to Miami, but their promises of a fresh start quickly dissolve in the summer heat.

Instead of fists, Andres now uses music to escape his parents’ battles. While wandering Miami Beach, he meets two girls: photographer Renee, a blaze of fire, and dancer Liora, a ray of sunshine. The three become a polyamorous triad, happy, despite how no one understands their relationship. But when a car accident leaves Liora in a coma, Andres and Renee are shattered.

Then Renee proposes a radical solution: She and Andres must go into the underworld to retrieve their girlfriend’s spirit and reunite it with her body—before it’s too late. Their search takes them to the City of the dead, where painters bleed color, songs grow flowers, and regretful souls will do anything to forget their lives on earth. But finding Liora’s spirit is only the first step in returning to the living world. Because when Andres drowned, he left a part of himself in the underworld—a part he’s in no hurry to meet again. But it is eager to be reunited with him…

In verse as vibrant as the Miami skyline, critically acclaimed author R.M. Romero has crafted a masterpiece of magical realism and an openhearted ode to the nature of healing.

ISBN-13: 9781682636916
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 05/07/2024
Age Range: 14 – 17 Years

Filed under: Guest Post