A Sneak Peek...

• Meet Rafa: Our protagonist, Rafa Fuentes, isn't your average kid. He juggles the pressures of schoolwork with a troubled family situation – his mom's about to be released from prison. To escape reality, Rafa weaves fantastical ghost stories, his imagination a refuge.

• Beware the Blood Moon: Under the eerie glow of a crimson moon, Rafa spins a tale of a vengeful spirit, The Caretaker, who lurks by the neighborhood pond, luring unsuspecting children to their doom. But what happens when fiction bleeds into reality?

• A Race Against Time: Strange occurrences begin to plague Rafa. Could The Caretaker be real? With the help of his friends and a mysterious magical jaguar, Rafa embarks on a thrilling quest to confront the evil entity and save his town from its clutches.

If there was one message that you’d want every reader of this book to have, what would it be? 

There’s a line in this story that the main character, Rafa Fuentes, says and I hope it resonates with readers. “You don’t get to make up my ending. I only get to do that.” It’s a line spoken in a moment of fear and frustration. It says a lot about how Rafa has always been judged by his mom’s mistakes. She’s a ghost that haunts his life constantly. I’ve known a lot of Rafa Fuentes-type-kids in my life. A lot of people think they know how his life will go and how he’ll end up, but really, they don’t know him at all. Only Rafa knows what he expects from his life and himself. I feel it’s an important message: We hold the pen to our lives and no one else gets to write how our story plays out for us.