Chantel Acevedo Books in Order

If you want Cuban family stories with a touch of the uncanny: Love and Ghost Letters → The Distant Marvels → Cages
If you like women-centered historical fiction: A Falling Star → The Living Infinite
If you want ancient-world adventure for teens: Song of the Red Cloak
If you want middle grade myth and friendship: Muse Squad → The Mystery of the Tenth
If you want a spooky standalone for younger readers: The Curse on Spectacle Key

Chantel Acevedo was born in Miami to Cuban parents and grew up in Hialeah, Florida, in a big extended family of Cuban exiles. Stories were part of everyday life there, and she has spoken about a storytelling grandmother who helped shape the way she listens to language, family memory, and the past.

Books got there early.

Acevedo has written about her first reading memory as a Sleeping Beauty Golden Book, and about how the local library felt like a second home. She also read far above her age level, pulling books from her mother's shelves and learning, very young, that reading could take you somewhere larger and stranger than your own block.

Her first attempts at writing were fantasy stories. She has said that she loved the sweetness of L.M. Montgomery, then later picked up some of the darker energy of Stephen King. At the University of Miami, where she earned her MFA, she learned the practical side of the craft, rhythm, setting, imagery, plot, and she found Latina and Latino writers who showed her that her own family's experience belonged in literature, too.

Before she was known for novels, she started out teaching high school English. Her debut, Love and Ghost Letters, brought together Cuba, Miami, family tension, and the uncanny in a story about Josefina Navarro, her father, and a trail of letters that seem to cross the line between the living and the dead. The book won a Latino International Book Award and was a finalist for Connecticut Book of the Year.

History keeps showing up in her work, but it always comes with real feeling.

In A Falling Star, she turns to the Mariel Boatlift and follows two girls growing up in different American cities while painful family truths slowly come into view. In The Distant Marvels, an elderly storyteller trapped during Hurricane Flora recounts a whole lifetime of love, war, and regret, and that novel went on to become a finalist for the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. The Living Infinite shifts to Spain, Cuba, and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, reimagining the life of Princess Eulalia as a woman determined to claim her own voice. And in Cages, Acevedo returns to Havana, London, and Miami in a multi-voiced story about exile, forbidden love, and the damage families can leave unspoken.

She writes for younger readers, too. Her Muse Squad books bring Greek mythology into the life of a Cuban American girl in Miami, while The Curse on Spectacle Key turns a Florida Keys lighthouse into the center of a ghostly mystery about roots, friendship, and family history. Even when the audience changes, her interests stay familiar: belonging, courage, memory, and the way the past keeps talking.

These days Acevedo teaches English and creative writing at the University of Miami while continuing to write for both adults and younger readers. Readers often come to her for sweeping historical settings, complicated families, touches of the supernatural, and characters who are trying to make sense of where they come from and who they want to become.