A Second Chance on Earth

A father, a friend, and a favorite book help a teen boy understand love and loss in this moving and vivid YA novel-in-verse.

Have you ever/encountered a book that/KO’d you, Iron Mike Tyson style?
A book that made you ponder/if every other book ever written/was even good?

For sixteen-year-old poet and b-baller Marcos Cadena, that book is the beat-up copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude he finds among his late father’s possessions after Papi is killed in a motorcycle accident.

Marcos’ papi has always loomed large in his eyes. So when Marcos travels from Miami to his parents’ childhood home of Cartagena, Colombia to spread Papi’s ashes, he brings his father’s book with him, convinced that Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece holds the key to understanding Papi’s life and accepting his death.

In Cartagena, Marcos doesn’t really feel at home among the affectionate but unfamiliar Cadena clan. Instead, he befriends 18-year-old Camilo, a taxi driver and fellow García Márquez fan who appoints himself Marcos’ unofficial tour guide. Together, the two boys explore the landscape of Cartagena, from the picturesque streets of Old Town to the poor neighborhood where Camilo grew up. But when Camilo reveals a troubling secret about his former life as part of a local gang, Marcos must ask himself whether everyone deserves a second chance.

Woven through with themes of friendship, family, and forgiveness, this poignant coming-of-age novel is also a love letter to Colombia and to the books of Gabriel García Márquez.