About this item
Thirteen-year-old Boli and his friends are deep in the middle of a game of marbles. An older boy named Mosca has won the prized Devil's Fire marble. His pals are jealous and want to win it away from him. This is Izayoc, the place of tears, a small pueblo in a tiny valley west of Mexico City where nothing much happens. It's a typical hot Sunday morning except that on the way to church someone discovers the severed head of Enrique Quintanilla propped on the ledge of one of the cement planters in the plaza and everything changes. Not apocalyptic changes, like phalanxes of men riding on horses with stingers for tails, but subtle ones: poor neighbors turning up with brand-new SUVs, pimpled teens with fancy girls hanging off them. Boli's parents leave for Toluca and don't arrive at their destination.
About the Author
Phillippe Diederich is a Haitian-American writer and photographer born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Mexico City and Miami. He is the winner of the 2017 PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship. His novel PLAYING FOR THE DEVIL'S FIRE, Cinco Puntos Press 2016, was awarded the 2017 HEB Best Young Adult Novel by the Texas Institute of Letters. PLAYING FOR THE DEVIL'S FIRE was also listed in the 2017 Young Adult Library Services Association best YA novels as well as in the 2017 Cooperative Children's Book Center best YA list. His first novel, SOFRITO, Cinco Puntos Press 2015, made the L.A. Times list "23 Fiction Books to Read this Summer" and Bookriot's "6 Small Press Books to Read this Summer." He lives and works in Southwest Florida.
