One Last Chance to Live
by Francisco X. Stork
High School    Scholastic    320 pp.
9/24    9781339010236    $19.99
e-book ed.  9781546109662    $19.99

Nico Kardos is a Mexican American high school senior from the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx. He works at a fish market in the morning and sells drugs for the local gang but is taking creative writing in school to pursue his dream of being a writer. (Nico narrates his story through class-assigned journal entries.) Rosario Zamora—his childhood friend, unrequited crush, and fellow aspiring writer—died six months ago of a heroin overdose, and Nico is still grieving. In a vivid dream that portends his own death and those of his mother and younger brother, Rosario appears and says something to him that he cannot remember afterward. The dream drives him to explore the circumstances of her death, even as his family situation worsens: his mother’s health deteriorates, and his younger brother seems poised to join the same gang. It’s a lot for a young man to handle, and Stork juggles the multiple plot strands adeptly, laying bare Nico’s introspective thoughts in spare prose, with evergreen issues (coming of age, grief and loss, the power of literacy) and enough mystery to keep the pages turning.

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.