Two Cinco Puntos Press Titles in New Editions

Olor a perfume de viejita

By Claudia Guadalupe Martinez

Translated by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite

Edited by Sylvia Zeleny

The classic Latinx growing up story, The Smell of Old Lady Perfume, now by popular demand in SPANISH!

Claudia Martinez’ novel for middle-grade readers is a bittersweet story about family, death and the resilient emotional strength of the human heart. Chela Gonzalez, the book’s narrator, is a nerd and a soccer player who can barely contain her excitement about starting the sixth grade. To Chela, her family is like a solar system, with her father the sun, and her mother, brothers and sister like planets rotating all around him. It’s the only world she fits in. But that universe is threatened when her strong father has a stroke. Chela’s grandmother moves in to help the family. The smell of her old lady perfume invades the house. That smell is worse than Sundays. Sundays were sad, but death is a whole other thing. In her grief and worry, Chela begins to discover herself and find her own strength.

Watch Out for Clever Women  

¡Cuidado con las mujeres astutas!

By legendary storyteller Joe Hayes

Illustrations by Vickie Trego Hill

A Bilingual Classic—Texas Bluebonnet Master List and Winner of the Southwest Book Award—with FIVE NEW STORIES. The book includes Joe’s signature story The Day It Snowed Tortillas.

According to an old saying, Una mujer piensa más en un solo minuto que un hombre en un mes entero—A woman thinks more in a minute than a man does in a whole month. For me, the saying refers to the rich inner life many women developed in Western cultures when so much of the external, active life was denied them. This collection of eleven Hispanic stories celebrates the strength of women that comes from this thinking.

My hope is that readers will find these stories spicy enough that they’ll begin to tell them themselves. And if they do, I invite them to add something from their own imaginations to make the stories even richer. —Joe Hayes