I’m glad you asked!
It’s called “The Mexicandroid: ¡Half Mariachi, Half Machine!”
Here’s the pitch that got it into Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award contest:
“They say he just rolled in with the tumbleweeds one day, the mysterious mariachi without a past. But when demons from a former life rear their ugly heads, it’s his past that Antonio Salas must confront head on or risk losing everything he loves.
Antonio couldn’t tell you how he ended up in the colorful, colonial town of San Miguel. He also couldn’t tell you where he got his old wooden guitar, and he definitely couldn’t tell you how he knew to play it so well. Music, to him, comes as naturally as breathing. His talents earn him the title “El Mariachi Milagroso,” The Miraculous Mariachi, and it isn’t long before the shrewd Anita Hernandez offers him a permanent gig at her cantina downtown and an apartment upstairs.
His song wins him the heart of the governor’s beautiful daughter, Isabella, and the two are soon married with a baby on the way. Things couldn’t be better for Antonio Salas, and whatever memories he’d lost before could stay lost for all he cared.
That is, until the cantina is bombed, Anita is killed, and Isabella is kidnapped. His only clue? A strange letter from Isabella’s captor, addressed to Antonio and signed, Your Maker.
Together with Anita’s street-savvy young daughter, Eppie, and San Miguel’s most notorious bandit, Sancho, Antonio must embark on a journey to save his wife and confront his past. A past made even stranger when Antonio makes a bizarre discovery: he is half robot.
The Mexicandroid is a wild romp, assembled out of equal parts humor and heart, sci-fi and adventure. On the way, Antonio will battle with bandits and wrestle with robots, but it’s his struggles with his own humanity that really make this story a song worth singing.”
Now while the title is certainly an attention grabber, don’t write it off as being in the same vein as “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” The premise of my novel was done to make fun of what I see as a pop fiction trend of selling books on the ludicrousness of the title. And so the punchline of my book is that it actually has high literary themes.
The central theme of The Mexicandroid is identity, followed closely by autonomy. It’s based on my experiences as a biracial person and the internal conflicts that can arise from that. It’s also about control, and is a contemplation on how much freedom you have to identify yourself.
It got a great review in Publishers Weekly, and I hope to get it to an agent very soon.
