When authors David Bowles and Guadalupe Garcia McCall sat down to brainstorm myths they could retell in their next book, Garcia McCall said one immediately came to mind.
“’Hearts of Fire and Snow’ is a kind of contemporary retelling of the ancient Mesoamerican legend of the volcanoes that are right outside of Mexico City that were supposedly formed from a warrior and his dead lover,” Bowles said. “And it not only retells the story, but also serves as a kind of sequel set in modern-day Reno, Nevada, and a high school.”
“Hearts of Fire and Snow” is a young adult novel that was chosen for the lineup of the Texas Book Festival this year. Garcia McCall said she grew up loving the tale the book is based on.
“I love the story of the two volcanoes. We see images of it all over Mexico in calendars and cars, on the hood of cars,” she said. “And so I thought, that’s the myth that is close to my heart. It’s a love story, but it also includes nature. It’s a tale as old as time. Plus, it has that Romeo and Juliet kind of situation going on, and I wanted to explore that.”
Bowles remembers hearing the myth for the first time in high school and falling in love with the story.
“I knew that it was a story that I would be coming back to again and again because it’s so rich with implications for understanding what mattered to people in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and to seeing how human they were,” he said. “Something like love and despair and joy, the kinds of things that are so important in our lives in the modern day resonated the same for them back then.”
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Garcia McCall said the novel is the kind of book she would have loved to read as a teen growing up on the Texas-Mexico border.
“When I was growing up, the only things that were in our literature books were Greek mythology and a little bit of Norse mythology, like Thor,” she said. “But I wanted to hear about the stories of my culture, the stories about the Indigenous people. I never could find them.
“And so meeting David, knowing that he is a historian and that he loves the literature of our country, I wanted to also pair up with him and say, ‘Well, let’s bring these stories to life. Let’s bring them into the forefront.’ Because they really are nowhere to be found in American literature.”
Garcia McCall said she hopes readers pick up on themes in the book beyond the mythological retelling.
“We’re actually exploring the topics of acculturation, immigration, wealth, social standing, politics that exist in our world, that have always existed,” she said. “We are no different than others from other cultures. [I want readers to] see themselves and parts of themselves, their hearts, their thoughts, their feelings, and also what they want from the world and what they want for their futures.
“We all want to be loved. We all want to have a second chance when we mess up. And we all want to have family and community around us. And I think that that’s really important to my characters, and I would want them to see the things that bind us together, the things that make us human.”
