The Hidden City (Garza Twins)

As with the first two books in the Garza Twins series, The Hidden City follows a similar structure: Carol and Johnny Garza, twin shapeshifters, learn more about their heritage and powers, uncovering a dire plot that must be foiled. This time, Carol and Johnny go in search of the Ollamat, a stone created from the heart of one of the ancestors, another in a set of twins who could wield savage magic. Along the way, however, Carol and Johnny learn that their uncle is a member of a militaristic force bent on eradicating naguales, or shapeshifters like Carol, Johnny, and their mother. Their lives are further thrown into turmoil when their hunt for the Ollamat requires that they once more travel into mythical lands, navigating a series of planes inhabited by the dead. The plot takes Carol and Johnny on another magical journey and sets the stage for future entries into the series.As Carol and Johnny face new foes and meet new friends, The Hidden City adds more dimension to this series by revealing Carol’s crush on her friend, Nikki. Carol’s sexuality isn’t treated as a novelty or a token, but an extension of herself. Carol is aware of the heteronormative bounds within which she and Nikki live, and so her trepidation to reveal those feelings to Nikki feels natural. She questions her sexuality and attraction like many young people do—is this love? Is this just friendship? She’s confused, but not because of any internalized homophobia, rather she’s young and this feeling is so new. What’s more, Carol’s sexuality is normalized when Johnny reveals to her that he’s known about her bisexuality for a while and, of course, he’s accepting of it because both of their parents are bi. Thus, not only do we have a young, Latinx, bisexual protagonist, but we also have queer parents—this is radical for Latinx youth literature, and, frankly, all youth literature. Carol’s sexuality is implied and hinted to in the previous books, but that this text names it—and names it bisexuality in a world where media is so often guilty of bisexual erasure—is significant and changemaking.Carol’s sexuality, juxtaposed against the search for the Ollamat, produces a dynamic and intriguing plot, one that will doubtless captivate young readers. As with all of the other books in this series, Bowles has a particular magic in making his worlds believable even as he adds more and more fantastic elements. For readers familiar with Latinx youth literature, it is easy to recognize that Bowles’s Garza Twins series not only fills in a gap as far as queer representation within the genre, but it also provides some much-needed fantasy. Latinx children’s literature is a relatively young genre, but contributions like Bowles’s mean that we’re getting more and more texts that move away from the racialized problem novel and instead offer fun, engaging, and challenging texts for young readers, Latinx and non-Latinx alike.

In this third adventure with twins Juan Ángel (Johnny) and Carolina (Carol), I found the Mexican-American siblings travelling, with their parents, from southernmost Texas to a jungle in Mexico. Along the way, Indigenous lore from south of the Rio Grande came to life as the family faced foes and met allies among deities, demigods, and fantastical creatures -- among the latter was a sentient amphibian, my favorite of the newcomers.A relative of the Garza family posed a more down-to-earth threat, due to his apparent phobia toward shapeshifters (i.e. the twins). I was just a bit surprised he did not have a more substantial presence in the novel. Much as with the prior books in this series for tweens, my only hardship was keeping track of exotic (and multiple) Nahuatl and Maya names and aliases. Johnny provided some aid in this, via the levity of his typical pop-culture nods.I was intrigued by a newly explored facet of Carol: She discovered her emerging (and possibly mutual) attraction to a female school classmate. Any reader who may be taken aback by such a subplot truly needs to set aside any qualms, as the subject is conveyed tactfully and believably. Another likeable character -- a boy raised by a clan of bipedal simians -- posed a potential obstacle to this part of Carol's life, via his own apparent infatuation in her.