Two Flags, One Heart. A bittersweet, music-filled YA novel about bicultural identity, family secrets, a rival turned ally, first love, grief, and the courage to belong to more than one world

Her father couldn't choose between two countries. So he chose to leave. Paloma was seven when her papa crouched on the gravel driveway, cupped her cheeks in the same hands that taught her the G chord, kissed her forehead, and drove the old blue Chevy toward the bridge to Mexico. That night she traced the crack in her ceiling that looks like the Rio Grande and made herself a promise. All he left behind was a cracked guitar and her mother's warning. "He wanted both.
So he ended up with nothing." Now Paloma is seventeen, and the mariachi competition at Fiesta de la Bandera is six weeks away. Six weeks to stand on that stage in her charro suit and prove to her mother, her abuelo, and everyone watching that she knows exactly who she is. One side. One flag. One answer. Just like her mother taught her. But the closer the festival gets, the harder it is to keep the line straight. Her sharp-tongued cousin Isabel wants the same trophy and won't pretend otherwise. A boy with the wrong accent makes her question the song she's been singing her whole life. And a photo hidden in a trunk threatens to unravel everything she believed about why her father really left. The harmony she's chasing on stage starts to sound a lot like the one she's been refusing to feel. When her two worlds collide under the lights, Paloma has to decide whether being one thing or the other was ever the point. Or whether two flags can beat in a single heart. "Choose, " she'd told herself for ten years.
"Pick one side. Stay there." But her father chose one side, and it cost him everything. Maybe the bravest thing isn't choosing. Maybe it's refusing to. Two Flags, One Heart is a bittersweet, music-filled YA novel about bicultural identity, family secrets, a rival turned ally, first love, grief, and the courage to belong to more than one world. Perfect for readers who love own-voices contemporary YA, mariachi and music, complicated mother-daughter bonds, rivals-to-friends, and stories about claiming who you are.
A standalone YA with a tender, triumphant ending.