Pig Park (Cinco Puntos, 2014): It’s crazy! Fifteen-year-old Masi Burciaga hauls bricks to help build a giant pyramid in her neighborhood park. Her neighborhood is becoming more of a ghost town each day since the lard company moved away. Even her school closed down. Her family’s bakery and the other surviving businesses may soon follow.

As a last resort, the neighborhood grown-ups enlist all the remaining able-bodied boys and girls into this scheme in hopes of luring visitors. Maybe their neighbors will come back too. But something’s not right about the entrepreneur behind it all. And then there’s the new boy who came to help. The one with the softest of lips. Pig Park is a contemporary Faustian tale that forces us to look at the desperate lengths people will go to in the name of community–and maybe love.

Pig Park is winner of the 2015 Texas Institute of Letters Best Young Adult Book Award and 2015 NAACS Tejas Foco Best YA Fiction Award.  It  also appears on several reading lists, including Chicago Public Library’s Books for Kids Interested in Engineering,  Chicago Public School’s Recommended HS Reading 2015,  We’re the People Recommended Summer Reading, 2016 CPS Elementary Battle of the BooksGrade 7-8 Official Title List, and ALAN’s Picks.