Paola Santiago Books in Order

In the Paola Santiago books, Tehlor Kay Mejia builds spooky middle grade adventures around one very practical hero. Paola, usually called Pao, loves science, space, and explanations that can be tested. That makes her a fun lead for a series rooted in Mexican folklore, because she starts from a place of deep skepticism even when ghosts keep showing up. The books begin in Arizona, near the Gila River, where Pao, her best friends Emma and Dante, and her family are already living with warnings that feel older than reason.

Then the river starts calling.

Paola Santiago and the River of Tears opens with La Llorona and a disappearance, but the series quickly grows larger than one monster. Pao keeps getting pulled toward a hidden world of spirits, rifts, and old powers, even as she tries to hold on to school, family, and friendship. Each book widens the map. What starts as a local haunting grows into road trips, ghostly landscapes, secret histories, and the strange, dangerous void that sits just outside everyday life.

The friendships matter as much as the scares. Emma brings steadiness and courage. Dante adds history, heartbreak, and a different kind of loyalty. Pao's relationship with her mother is a constant source of friction, protection, and love, especially because her mother takes the supernatural seriously long before Pao does. Later books add Bruto the chupacabra puppy, deeper family secrets, and the Niños de la Luz, whose training pushes Pao toward a bigger role in the fight. A lot of the tension comes from how hard it is to grow up when the adults around you are keeping things from you.

These books like monsters, but they care even more about loyalty.

Across Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares and Paola Santiago and the Sanctuary of Shadows, the ongoing arc turns on Pao learning that logic and belief do not have to cancel each other out. She keeps asking questions. She keeps doubting what she is told. And she keeps stepping toward danger because people she loves are on the other side of it. That balance gives the trilogy its personality. The tone stays spooky without losing its warmth. There are ghosts, nightmare creatures, eerie roads, and folklore with real bite, but there are also jokes, crushes, school stress, and the small humiliations of middle school.

If you like adventure series where each book has its own big threat but the character growth carries forward, this one does that very well. It reads like a ghost story, a friendship story, and a coming-of-age story at the same time. The folklore gives the books texture, but the heartbeat of the series is Pao herself: smart, stubborn, frightened, brave, and never quite willing to stop asking how the world works. That mix is what keeps the trilogy moving.