“In his debut for teens, Jiménez explores shades of manhood and all it entails with a deft, poetic hand.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
HOUSTON, TX August 2017— Joe Jiménez’s gritty debut novel for young adults, Bloodline, has been named the Middle Grade/Young Adult Discovery Prize Winner in the 2016 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards. Established in 1991, the awards recognize the year’s outstanding books published by Texas authors.
In his junior year, seventeen-year-old Abraham learns how to drive a stick shift. He falls in love for the first time. And he has been in three fights and suspended twice, all before Thanksgiving. His grandmother fears the hard future that awaits him, so she invites her son—the one with a fat police file who has hurt her so many times—back into the house. He is determined to make a man of his nephew. Meanwhile, Abraham’s feelings for his friend Ophelia grow, and she tries to understand why he fights. “This will end badly,” she warns. At school, Abraham learns about genetics, and he wonders if people are born bad. Is it in their DNA? Was he born to punch and kick and scream and fight and destroy things because of the genes in his body? Is that what happened to his father? All he knows is that his father is dead and his mother is gone.
A haunting story that questions what it really means to be a man, Bloodline was named one of Kirkus Reviews‘ Best Books of 2016, was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2016 H-E-B Award for Best Young Adult Book and was also included in NBC Latino’s Summer 2016 Reading List.
The novel has also received excellent praise from the trade media: The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books called it “an absorbing tale” and, according to The Horn Book Magazine, it “conveys simultaneously a vivid sense of immediacy and an element of reflective distance.”
Joe Jiménez, the author of The Possibilities of Mud, 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.
Arte Público Press is the nation’s largest and most established publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by U.S. Hispanic authors. Its imprint for children and young adults, Piñata Books, is dedicated to the realistic and authentic portrayal of the themes, languages, characters, and customs of Hispanic culture in the United States. Based at the University of Houston, Arte Público Press, Piñata Books and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project provide the most widely recognized and extensive showcase for Hispanic literary arts and creativity. For more information, please visit www.artepublicopress.com.