Francisco X. Stork's Second Chance: An Interview

Authors don’t often get second chances. When a book is published, it’s published, with all its reviews—the good, the bad, and the mixed. Francisco X. Stork is a happy exception. This past May, his novel On the Hook came out from Scholastic, to great acclaim, including on this site (lynmillerlachmann.com). This 2021 book for teen readers is a reimagining of his 2006 YA novel Behind the Eyes. Today, Francisco visits the blog to talk about how his writing has evolved over the past 15 years and what has changed in Hector’s story from then to now. In addition to Behind the Eyes and On the Hook, Francisco X. Stork is the author of the YA novels Marcelo in the Real World (2009), The Last Summer of the Death Warriors (2010), Irises (2012), The Memory of Light (2016), Disappeared (2017, and Illegal: A Disappeared Novel (2020).

LML: You’ve talked about how you rethought and rewrote your earlier YA novel, Behind the Eyes, to turn it into On the Hook. How did that original story come about?

FXS: I wrote Behind the Eyes (some fifteen years ago) when my son and daughter were teenagers. They were living a comfortable life in the suburbs of Boston, headed to good colleges, and I wanted them to see a different side of life, so I wrote about Hector, a young man growing up poor and afraid in the housing projects of El Paso. Hector’s story was based on my own story growing up in El Paso. I lived in the same housing projects that are depicted in the novel and, like Hector, I lived with fear of getting noticed.

Why did you choose to rewrite an old, out of print book rather than leaving it behind completely?

I really love Behind the Eyes. I’m very proud of the book that opened the doors for me to the world of young adult literature. There is no doubt in my mind that it is the best book I could have written at the time. But a few years after it was published, I began to see that there was untapped potential in Hector’s story. Hector’s story was not reaching some of the young men who were caught in a cycle of hatred and violence. I am grateful to Arthur Levine who saw what I saw and gave me the opportunity recreate Hector’s story.

How did the novel change in the course of your rewrite? How much of the change had to do with your development as a writer and how much with changes in the outside world?

On the Hook takes some of the existing characters and settings and turns them into a new story. The characters that remain, while they retain their old names, are different, more complex and more real. It is no longer just Hector’s story, but it is also the story of Hector’s antagonist, Joey. There are relationships that were not there before like the friendship between Hector and Azi. Most of all, Hector’s character and actions are a balance of interiority and agency that was only possible for me to create after many years of writing, after the publication of six other novels. I hope also that I am wiser than I was fifteen years ago! I know for sure that I am more acquainted with the debilitating and destructive effects of hatred (both in myself and in society) than I was then.

How might On the Hook speak more to young readers today? What do you want them to take away from this book?

Hector’s story is a current story. It reflects the way that hatred has become prevalent and even considered “normal” in today’s world. I hope that the book becomes a meditation on violence and hatred, on how it grows and how we might see a way to take the energy of anger and hatred and put it into the hard task of finding common ground with others.

What’s next for your writing? Do you have plans to stay with young adult fiction or move into another category or genre?

I am working on a young adult novel now that will come out late next year. I’m switching gears a little and writing a love story. I don’t have any ideas for any fiction work after that. I’m open to writing another young adult novel if the inspiration comes. I’m happy writing about and for young people and am not interested in writing adult fiction. In the back of my mind there is the seed of an idea about writing a book about the practice of writing for young writers. So, maybe.

Thank you! I look forward to the new novel!

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann

(Lyn originally interviewed Francisco X. Stork for her blog, lynmillerlachmann.com. Thank you, Lyn, for permission to share this interview on De Colores (decoloresreviews.blogspot.com.).

On the Hook

author: Francisco X. Stork

publisher: Scholastic Press, 2001

grades 6-up

(Mexican American)

Francisco X. Stork is an acclaimed author of eight novels for young readers. His most recent novel, On the Hook, is a reimagining of his debut YA novel, Behind the Eyes, which was published in 2006. We’re fortunate to have this second-chance book out in the world.

On the Hook is full of ethical dilemmas with characters about whom we deeply care. Sixteen-year-old Hector Robles is a chess enthusiast, an honor student, and devoted to his family, aware of his responsibilities ever since the death of his father from cancer several years earlier. He and his classmate Azi, an immigrant from Iran, are becoming close, and he ponders what it means to have a girlfriend and to be a good boyfriend. He wants to stay out of trouble, but in the projects of El Paso, Texas, trouble seems to follow him in the form of drug dealer Chavo—whose  one-time girlfriend is now engaged to Hector’s older brothe—and Chavo’s drug-addicted younger brother Joey. At least Hector’s older brother has turned his life around and is planning to move the family out of the projects and to safety once he fixes up a house belonging to his boss.

In one violent night, Chavo and Joey wipe out Hector and his family’s future. Hector and Joey are on their way to a military-style therapeutic boys’ school together, with Hector single-mindedly plotting revenge against Joey. Here, things become interesting. Hector had won an award for an essay about “happiness,” focusing on his father’s journey from Mexico to the United States, his hard work, and his close family, but now he sees that Joey is the one who’s happy. Freed from his brother and his drug addiction, Joey is thriving in the rigidly-structured environment of the school. Does Hector now want to snatch that promise of happiness away, the way Joey snatched his happiness away months earlier? What are the consequences if he does? And how can Hector find happiness again?

Stork’s novels for young readers are deeply thought-provoking, and this one is no exception. His third-person voice conveys a respect for teen readers without preaching, and the principal characters are multi-dimensional—the heroes of their own stories. The theme of happiness runs through the book in unexpected ways, as we see that even someone like Joey deserves a better life than the one he has had so far.

On the Hook is a great book for teen reading circles. Today, the questions it explores go beyond the personal—stories of individuals and families—to society as a whole. We are at a point in our country’s history where hatreds have turned murderous, and reconciliation needs to happen at all levels of society. We all deserve happiness.

*Highly recommended for all home, classroom and library collections.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann

(published 5/28/2021)

(Note: Lyn reviewed On the Hook simultaneously for De Colores and her blog, lynmillerlachmann.com.)

Last Summer of the Death Warriors // Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de sus Ojos)

Many of the global conflicts we face today are the result of a cycle of violence and revenge that go back many generations. For instance, Ivo Andric’s classic novel, The Bridge on the Drina, translated from Serbo-Croatian and published in the United States in 1977, portrays generations of a Bosnian family from the late 1500s to the start of the First World War. Hatreds from medieval times have reproduced themselves over and over again, touching off the carnage in Europe in 1914 and again following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

We see the same pattern in other political conflicts. A wronged party, unable to gain recourse from local, national, or international judicial systems, turns to violence. Those in power, or those targeted by the violence, respond with force, leading to further acts of violence in retaliation.

And on it goes.

We see the same patterns in our personal lives—neighbor pitted against neighbor, an argument in school that spirals out of control and leads to a fight with dozens of teenagers involved. And we wonder at what point could the violence have been stopped, the cycle broken.

I have been thinking about these issues ever since reading Francisco X. Stork’s novel, The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, and a couple of weeks later seeing the Academy Award-winning film The Secret in Their Eyes. In both cases, an act of violence destroys the life of a character, and in both cases, a character chooses to break the cycle.

author: Francisco X. Stork

Scholastic, 2010

grades 9-up   

Mexican American

 The Last Summer of the Death Warriors is loosely based on the classic tale of Don Quixote, but from the point of view of the idealistic knight’s humble squire. Pancho Sanchez finds himself in an orphanage following his father’s death in an industrial accident and, a few months later, the death of his developmentally disabled sister under suspicious circumstances. The angry Pancho was supposed to have been sent to a reformatory following a fight in a foster home in which he seriously injured another boy, and he expects that soon enough, he will be going to prison for a very long time. The reason is that he has pledged to hunt down and kill the man who took sexual advantage of his sister and caused her death.

Given a second chance at the orphanage, Pancho meets D.Q., an Anglo boy with terminal brain cancer. D.Q. is writing “The Death Warrior Manifesto,” his principles of living the time he has left to the fullest. As D.Q. is forced to undergo harsh chemotherapy at the bequest of his estranged mother—who brought him to the orphanage when she had a nervous breakdown following her husband’s death—Pancho becomes D.Q.’s helper and friend. Watching D.Q. struggle to achieve a life worth living, falling in love for the first time with the beautiful Marisol (who also happens to be D.Q.’s love interest), and remembering the wisdom of his late father, Pancho comes to realize that his own life may be worth living. He sees that an act of violence will destroy his chance for a future; as he writes to his sister: “After you died I didn’t care much for life. Now I think we need to take care of it.” And how he deals with the sex offender is equally remarkable.

In The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, the system doesn’t work for Pancho—in large part because he is poor and Latino and the man responsible for his sister’s death is Anglo and middle class. The failure of the judicial system in a vicious rape/murder is at the heart of The Secret in Their Eyes, an Argentine film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film in 2010. Once again, people denied recourse to a system trusted to be fair and consistent are tempted to take justice into their own hands.

director: Juan José Campanella

2009

rated R 

Argentinian

 The Secret in Their Eyes follows a police investigator, Benjamin Esposito, as he pursues this vicious crime against a beautiful newlywed. Almost immediately after her death, two construction workers—one an immigrant from Bolivia, the other a poor Argentine—are brought into the police station. Visiting them in their cell, Esposito knows their confessions have been coerced, and with the help of the victim’s husband, he tracks down the real criminal. The young widower, Ricardo Morales, asks what the punishment will be. “Life in prison,” is the answer. Less than a year later, though, the criminal is released, due to his cooperation with authorities and his skill at hunting down “subversives” on the eve of Argentina’s Dirty War.

But one of the first “subversives” the released criminal hunts down is Esposito himself, who barely escapes Buenos Aires with his life. Morales is a second target, but in a brilliant twist, Morales (whose name foreshadows the role he plays in the film) exacts the justice that Argentina’s justice system—which goes from incompetent to corrupt to a perpetrator of crimes against humanity—is unable to accomplish.

Both of these creative works demonstrate the key role that a functioning judicial authority plays in breaking the cycle of violence. In the absence of such an authority, the pressure falls on individual peacemakers who make the conscious choice not to escalate the hatred. Recommended.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann
(published 4/9/13)

Marcelo in the Real World

author: Francisco X. Stork

Scholastic, 2009

grades 7-up 

Mexican American

Seventeen-year-old Marcelo Sandoval has attended an exclusive private school for children with disabilities for most of his life. Yet his father, a high-powered attorney whom Marcelo calls by his first name, Arturo, wants this sensitive teen with Asperger Syndrome to experience “the real world.” Arturo arranges for Marcelo to work in the mailroom of his law firm. Taunted and exploited by the son of a colleague, Marcelo comes across a big secret the law firm is hiding. His dogged pursuit of the truth brings him into direct conflict with his own self-interest and the values and goals of his father.

In many ways, this novel begs comparison with Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time—with the protagonist’s autism spectrum disorder, his uncovering of a family secret, and his pursuit of truth and goodness in a confusing and often hostile and corrupt world. Stork, an attorney as well as an author of two other novels for young people, overlays a philosophical dimension onto the character-driven story. Marcelo’s “special interest”—world religions—is atypical of persons with Asperger (the most common is trains and other modes of transportation, but interests can vary widely). The discussions Marcelo has with a female rabbi—even though he is not Jewish—prompt him to follow his conscience.

Another unusual aspect of this book is its depiction of an affluent Mexican-American family. Arturo’s practice relies on corporate clients in Mexico. This is a reality rarely touched on in books for young people, which tend to focus on poverty, migrant labor, and gang life when portraying Mexican Americans. Stork’s novel will challenge readers’ assumptions while offering a memorable protagonist and a great story, too. Highly recommended.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann
(published 4/7/13)

Irises

author: Francisco X. Stork

grades 7-up 

Mexican American

Eighteen-year-old Kate Romero and her 16-year-old sister, Mary, have helped their father take care of their mother for years, after a car accident left her in a permanent vegetative state. The stress has taken its toll on their father, a Pentecostal minister with an increasingly restive flock. When Reverend Romero dies suddenly of a heart attack, Kate and Mary must take care of their mother themselves. Their financial resources are dwindling rapidly, and the people around them to provide support—Kate’s boyfriend, Simon; their Aunt Julia; and Andres Soto, the ambitious young preacher who intended to replace Rev. Romero even before his death—have their own agendas. When the intellectual Kate spurns Simon’s marriage proposal because she wants to attend Stanford University on scholarship and the artistic Mary falls in love with an unlikely gang member, the girls weigh, in their separate ways, their duty to family against their right to pursue their dreams.

Stork (Marcelo in the Real World and The Last Summer of the Death Warriors) has proven himself a master of characterization and character development, and Irises—his first novel narrated from a female point of view (though in third person)—is no exception. There is a subtle creepiness in otherwise good people that will draw readers in and won’t let them go. Basically, no one is who he or she seems on the surface. A concerned and overwhelmed father turns out to exert a level of psychological control, even beyond the grave, that borders on abuse. An ambitious preacher who challenges doctrine and urges congregants to be honest with themselves struggles with inappropriate sexual urges. (Stork’s restraint for this plot thread is masterful.) A resentful, grudging aunt makes a far larger sacrifice for family than she is willing to reveal. Readers will sense the competition and jealousies beneath Kate and Mary’s apparent closeness.  While Stork doesn’t feel compelled to give his protagonists a happy ending, insight into who they are serves as the first step to genuine growth and maturity. 

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann

(published 4/7/13)

*Highly recommended for all home, classroom and library collections.