Careful what you wish for in Vanessa Montalban’s These Vengeful Wishes, in which a teen girl’s rage is ignited by a vengeful female spirit with a thirst for justice. The Summer I Ate The Rich by Maika Moulite & Maritza Moulite is a biting modern-day fable inspired by Haitian zombie lore that explores what happens when a Haitian American girl uses her previously hidden abilities to exact revenge on the wealthy elites who have caused her family pain. Trang Thanh Tran’s They Bloom At Night tells the story of a small Louisiana town overtaken by a strange red algae bloom, a teen who confronts the past she buried, and the monsters that swim beneath us…and live within us. Jihyun Yun captures the haunting of family myths in And The River Drags Her Down, where one sister breaks rules and uses ancestral magic to bring another sister back from the dead, with harrowing results. Moderated by FIU professor Celeste Glglio.
Buy These Vengeful Wishes – Montalban
Buy The Summer I Ate the Rich – Moulite & Moulite
Buy They Bloom at Night – Tran
Buy And the River Drags Her Down – Yun
Miami-born VANESSA MONTALBAN channels her wanderlust for far-off worlds into writing young adult fiction, including A Tall Dark Trouble, winner of the Florida Book Awards in the YA category. She’s a first-generation college graduate and is hard at work creating a collection of stories. Her work has appeared in Diabolical Plots and Entropy. Her newest novel, These Vengeful Wishes (Zando Young Readers), was published in 2025.
