The best books about Puerto Rico

A ‘sucio’ goes to an underground clinic for therapy to end his machista ways and is accidentally transitioned. Ex-gangbangers gone straight deal with a troubled, gifted son drawn to the gangsta lifestyle promoted by an emerging music called hip hop. Dead and stuck “between somewhere and nowhere,” Roberto Clemente, the great Puerto Rican baseball icon, soon confronts the reason for his predicament. These are a few of the characters in J.L. Torres’s second story collection, Migrations, the inaugural winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Prize.

These stories take us inside the lives of Diasporicans, Puerto Ricans in the diaspora: self-exiles, unhomed, and unhinged people, estranged from loved ones, family, culture, and collective history. Despite the effects of colonization of the body and mind, Puerto Ricans have survived beyond geography and form an integral part of the American mosaic.

A ‘sucio’ goes to an underground clinic for therapy to end his machista ways and is accidentally transitioned. Ex-gangbangers gone straight deal with a troubled, gifted son drawn to the gangsta lifestyle promoted by an emerging music called hip hop. Dead and stuck “between somewhere and nowhere,” Roberto Clemente, the great Puerto Rican baseball icon, soon confronts the reason for his predicament. These are a few of the characters in J.L. Torres’s second story collection, Migrations, the inaugural winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Prize.

These stories take us inside the lives of Diasporicans, Puerto Ricans in the diaspora: self-exiles, unhomed, and unhinged people, estranged from loved ones, family, culture, and collective history. Despite the effects of colonization of the body and mind, Puerto Ricans have survived beyond geography and form an integral part of the American mosaic.

When a scientific research institute in the Mojave Desert falls under suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11, the FBI connects the dots. But is the Bureau identifying terrorists or unwittingly targeting the innocent? In a novel spanning cultures and continents, Out of Place explores the cost of the security state as an international cast of richly imagined characters (both human and animal) have in common an unease that may well be true of most of us: feeling – or being seen as – out of place.

Bella wants to find out what she's good at. But she quits everything she (barely) tries because she's a disaster at it. Her somersaults are like clumsy jirafas rolling downhill, her piano playing like elephant feet. When she decides to learn how to bake with her wise old abuela, her first attempt at dulce de leche frosting looks like scaly cocodrilo skin. She must learn it's okay to try again or she won't be good at anything. Peppered with Spanish vocabulary and set in an intergenerational Latinx home, Bella's Recipe for Success will show all kids the value of practicing to learn a new skill, and that it's okay to make mistakes along the way.

In 1991, young Galán Betances escapes Cuba, leaving behind his mother and developmentally challenged sister, Gabriela. In 2012, Pat McAllister joins the Coast Guard, determined to live up to the example set by his older brother, Danny, who was injured in Iraq.

When Galán and Pat meet as neighbors in San Juan, Puerto Rico, they build a friendship based on their shared status as outsiders and their common desire to heal. With Gabriela at risk of being committed to a mental health facility in Cuba, Galán arranges to have her smuggled to Puerto Rico via the treacherous Mona Passage. Pat, whose Coast Guard cutter patrols these waters for cocaine traffickers and migrants, must decide if he is willing to risk everything to unite a family.

Veronica Mars meets Moxie in this hilarious and biting YA contemporary novel following Margot Mertz, a girl who runs a very online cleanup business erasing people’s nip-slips, dick pics, and embarrassing DMs from the internet. But when a fellow student hires her to take down some leaked nudes, Margot discovers a secret revenge porn site featuring Roosevelt High girls. And hell hath no fury like Margot when she sees girls’ butts shared without their consent. The more she digs, the deeper and darker the case becomes until Margot realizes that some jobs are so dirty, no one can come away clean. Even her. Gross.

Jesse is a young American sailor who experiences a tragic and life-changing spiritual event during a perilous return home. Following a chance encounter with a mysterious Russian journalist, his quest for inner peace takes a sharp turn as he descends into crippling alcoholism and increasingly reckless behaviors that inevitably lead him on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. From bartending in the gulf of Thailand, to interactions with tribal aborigines in the ancient jungles of Malaysia, to soul-fulfilling romances on the unique islands of Bali and Indonesia, and ultimately, an epic motorcycle expedition and dangerous journey through largely unknown locales seething with tense political strife in the high Himalayas of Northern India, Nepal, and across the Indian subcontinent to the unforgiving dry landscapes of the infamous Thar Desert during a historical heatwave.

Rookie Private Investigator Ray Courage is asked by "Stockbroker to the Stars" Lionel Stroud to investigate an employee who's been acting suspiciously. Ray soon learns not everything is as it appears at Stroud's firm. When his investigation uncovers a possible Ponzi Scheme orchestrated by Stroud himself, two people are murdered and Ray becomes Suspect Number One. Ray needs to find answers fast to avoid prison... or death at the hands of the killer. Complicating his efforts are threats from the son of a Mexican drug lord, hostility from an octogenarian with a penchant for lap dances, harassment from a cop bent on putting Ray away for life, and a rekindled love affair with Stroud's daughter. This is book two in a six-book series; all books can be read as standalone novels.

Gruesome murders, resembling urban legends, take place in a small college town. Wilk, Elena, and Wayne grow suspicious of their Urban Legends professor when their best friend, Savannah, is found dead in her dorm room with ‘Aren’t You Glad You Didn’t Turn on the Lights?’ written in blood on the mirror. Is Professor Stevens a deranged serial killer? Or just a creepy dude? They must find out the truth before they become the next victims.

On a cursed mountain in the dark heart of North Wales, three women divided by centuries are drawn to the cursed water mill that sits at the top. The young bride accompanying her zealous new husband to a new land, a man who dreams of building a water mill where no water flows; the orphaned witch desperately trying to contain a destructive power that grows more deadly by night, and a student photographer searching for the cause of her father’s mysterious illness. Three women, generations apart, bound together by the evil of one man who made an Unholy pact with The Beast. A man who, a thousand years later, may still be watching.