Fireblooms
by Alexandra Villasante
High School    Paulsen/Penguin    304 pp.
9/25    9780525514053    $19.99

Seventeen-year-old Sebas moves to New Gault, California, to care for his estranged mother, who has cancer. Student ambassador Lu is tasked with getting him onboard with TECH, the company that runs their high school. TECH provides tools for school and free food, but it also tracks everything about students, including how many words they use per month (unless, cleverly, they switch to other languages, namely Spanish). At first Sebas refuses, but Lu, who is passionate about TECH because they believe its practices helped prevent the serious bullying their friend group experienced in middle school, is persistent. Both can’t deny their mutual attraction. When Sebas gets a job reading people’s futures using his abuela’s cartas españolas at phone-free (and therefore TECH-free) hangout spot Dry Town, his earnings cover overpriced food in New Gault, but they’re not enough to pay for his mother’s mounting medical expenses, which leads him to make a tough decision. There is light interrogation of TECH motives, but the company is less a big-bad and more an unsettling backdrop for thoughtfully executed character interactions. Queer and Latine representation (including the incorporation of gender-neutral Spanish) is handled with care, and Sebas and Lu’s relationship builds slowly as they learn about each other’s struggles and creative endeavors. Villasante deals with timely questions of surveillance and identity, as well as bullying, while also crafting two deep, realistic-feeling narrators finding their way in a less-than-utopian world.

From the November/December 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.