Author Joe Jiménez’s gritty debut novel for young adults, BLOODLINE, has been awarded the 2017 NACCS Tejas Young Adult Fiction Book Award, for recognition as an outstanding work of Young Adult fiction that best represents a significant topic related to the Mexican-American/Chican@ experience in Texas.
A haunting story that questions what it really means to be a man, the novel was named one of Kirkus Reviews‘ Best Books of 2016, was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters’ H-E-B Award for Best Young Adult Book and was also included in NBC Latino’s Summer 2016 Reading List.
BLOODLINE has been widely praised:
“Jiménez explores shades of manhood and all it entails with a deft, poetic hand.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Joe Jiménez’s writing has astonished me and made me sit up and pay attention since the first time I heard him read his work out loud. He continues to make me yearn to hear what he has to say in a voice that is at once masculine, tender, brave and beautiful. I am his longtime fan.”—Sandra Cisneros, poet, essayist, novelist
“Joe Jiménez extiende chingazos unafraid and painfully poetic in this story of love, loss and family. I constantly felt a tension waiting for the collapse of Abram and his world; wanting to shield my eyes but not being able to. In Bloodline everything is beautiful and everything hurts, as it is whenever we chase that kind of truth and love that is always within our reach but still too far away.”—Isabel Quintero, author of Gabi, A Girl in Pieces
“Joe Jimenez’ debut YA novel is beautiful in the hardest way—luminous and poetic, heartbreaking and violent. Bloodline is the story of 17 year old Abram and all the questions he’s grappling with—family and relationships, school and the future, loneliness and dreams, and all the struggles that come with trying to discover who he really is and who he wants to be. In the outside world, Abram fights with his fists, and on the inside, he fights to listen to the inner voice urging him towards life.”—ire’ne lara silva, author of furia, flesh to bone, Blood Sugar Canto
Read more about the book here.
Joe Jiménez, the author of Bloodline (Piñata Books, 2016) and The Possibilities of Mud (Kórima Press, 2014), is the recipient of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute of Latino Studies 2016 Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Press Poetry Prize. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, where he teaches at Thomas Jefferson High School and is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop.