Colleen Mondor Reviews The Making of Yolanda La Bruja by Lorraine Avila

The Making of Yolanda La Bruja, Lorraine Avila (Levine Querida 978-1-64614-243-9, $19.99, tpb, 384pp) April 2023.

Bronx teen Yolanda Alvarez is hard at work living her best life when everything goes to hell in the most traumatic of ways. As the protagonist of The Making of Yolanda la Bruja, Yolanda is active in high school, devoted to her best friend, Victory, enjoying a sweet romance with the very dreamy José, and a dedicated student of her Dominican family’s spiritual traditions. Under the tutelage of her grandmother, Mamá Teté, she has been learning the ways of her ancestors, which involves everything from a daily tarot reading to inter­pretation of dreams and occasional visions. And everything is going great until Yolanda’s school accepts a transfer student, the son of a progressive politician who is looking for yet another place to straighten his kid out. Ben is white, while Yolanda and her classmates are Black and Brown. Thrust together by the typical machinations of school administration, (‘‘Why don’t you show the new student around?’’), Yolanda tries to be friendly but Ben doesn’t make it easy. This rich, privileged kid is angry and his latest target is everything (and everyone) associated with Julia De Burgos School. What comes next is entirely unexpected but how debut author Lorraine Avila gets there in this big-hearted, potent, and piercingly smart novel is sure to bring her many fans.

While it’s easy to be annoyed with the caustic, often obnoxious, Ben, Yolanda spends enough time with him around school to see that there is a potential other side to, if not an explanation for, his behavior. She begins to receive visions of Ben, which don’t provide enough clarity to tell her anything definitive, but do make clear that he is emotionally turbulent and hurting. He manages to make some friends at the school, and when she sees him interact with a longtime family employee and the friendly owner of a bodega he frequents, there are glimpses of a kind and thoughtful Ben. While she would prefer not to have to worry about him, they are thrust together enough that Yolanda has no choice but to be concerned with what is going on in Ben’s head. But as the visions become more detailed she is soon faced with a horrible truth: Ben has a gun and is going to hurt someone at the school.

The quick answer to Yolanda’s dilemma is to tell an adult what she has seen, which is what Victory urges her to do. But Yolanda knows that choice is not so simple. How does she explain her visions? While Victory rails that it doesn’t matter what people think, Yolanda is smart enough to realize that young women who mysteriously ‘‘see’’ something, especially young Brown women, don’t get believed or worse. And as scary as the vision is, she clings to the hope that it is a warning and not a certainty; that Ben can be prevented from doing something terrible. What she should do, what Ben might do, and what anyone else can do sends the novel’s tension into the stratosphere.

There is a lot about The Making of Yolanda la Bruja to love, starting with Yolanda’s sprawling, complicated family, her conversations with a variety of cool, geeky, astute classmates, and the excellent portrayal of a vibrant high school setting. Ben is not a simple, cardboard character. In the end, as much as Yolanda wants to understand what is going on with him, Avila shows that sometimes you can’t know and, more importantly, teenagers like Yolanda shouldn’t have to worry about it. There are plenty of other folks in Ben’s life, past and present, who should have seen what was go­ing on with this kid. That the situation has gotten this dire is on them, not her. But they miss it, they all miss it, and it is students and staff at Julia De Burgos School who pay the price.

More than anything, The Making of Yolanda la Bruja is the story of a determined young woman who embraces a fantastic and sometimes complicated heritage. (There is a fun shoutout to Sabrina the Teenage Witch at one point, and fitting Yolanda’s heritage in the long pantheon of witchy families is actually quite perfect.) While there are certainly some heavy moments in this book, there is also plenty to smile about. Yolanda shines brilliantly in this story, and Avila is to be credited for gifting readers with such a compel­ling character.

This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.

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