Every so often, I read a book that doesn’t just entertain—it reawakens something in me.

That’s what The Murmur of Bees by Sofía Segovia did.

Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish flu pandemic, it follows a boy wrapped in mystery, discovered covered in bees and taken in by a family grappling with love, land, and loss. There’s a quiet magic to this book—not the flashy, wand-waving kind, but the kind passed down through generations, whispered between the living and the dead.

This is the kind of magic I write with. The kind that lives in grief. The kind that looks ordinary until it suddenly isn’t.

Reading The Murmur of Bees reminded me why I write stories like The Ordinary Bruja—where the supernatural is never separate from identity, where memory and myth blur, and where healing is just as sacred as spellwork.

What stood out most was how the novel treats its characters with such grace, even when they’re messy or flawed. It gave me permission to do the same. To let my characters stumble, to let them carry inherited pain, to let them seek clarity in things the world says don’t exist.

This is why diverse books matter. They don’t just represent—they reclaim. They reflect the nuances we carry in our bodies, our histories, our silences.

I hope to write stories that do what this one did for me: slow me down. Pull me in. Make me look again—at magic, at family, at what we’re willing to believe in.