Staff Book Pick of the Week: Estrella's Quinceanera

This week's pick is Estrella's Quinceañera by Malín Alegría (YA ALEGRIA).

All Estrella wants for her fifteenth birthday is a simple party with her friends from her new private school, but her family (especially her mother) has an entirely different idea. Estrella's mother wants her to have a real quinceañera. With a puffy orange dress, gaudy decor, and a mariachi band looming in her near future, Estrella is wondering how she can possibly avoid the whole thing - and keep her new friends from finding out about its existence. That soon proves difficult, as does juggling the rest of her life - her old friends who have been roped into helping with the quince (and are not too pleased with how Estrella has more or less dropped them), her demanding schoolwork, and Speedy, the boy from the neighborhood Estrella has been secretly seeing. Will Estrella be able to handle it all without everything toppling down around her?