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From The Fall of Whit Rivera to Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, we love award-winning YA author Crystal Maldonado’s particular brand of romance, with its sensitive and heartfelt storylines, fat positivity, humor, Latine identities, and neurodivergent and queer characters. And the latest by Ms. Maldonado? Oh, she eats.
Get Real, Chloe Torres is out next summer (5/13/2025) and centers around a disheveled friend group. Chloe Torres’s friend group, to be specific, which was torn asunder by messy romantic feelings and relationship geometry (i.e., a love triangle). Thing is, Chloe is about to go off to art school and wants her last summer before college to involve reuniting with former besties Romona and Sienna. So, she plans a road trip full of bucket-list items neither girl can refuse, which will culminate in them seeing their favorite boy band’s reunion show. But being in a car full of sapphic pining can get real messy real fast.
Check out the gorgeous cover for Get Real, Chloe Torres (cover illustration by Saniyyah Zahid and jacket design by Chelsea Hunter) below, and keep scrolling for an excerpt from Chapter 1, then a little tea on the book, the cover, and the inspiration from Maldonado herself.
Chapter One
I have had a lot of humiliating things happen to me in my almost eighteen years on this planet.
When I was eight, my dad insisted on holding my hand as he walked me into class on my first day of third grade. For the entire year, everyone called me Baby Chloe.
In middle school, I literally fainted when my teacher pulled out the frogs we were supposed to dissect in class. Legend has it I even hit my head on a stool on the way to the floor. Cool.
And once ( . . . recently) I went into a Lush beauty store with my cousin-bestie, Diego, and thought the foam bubble bath sampler they had was edible, so I fully took a bite in front of the sales associate.
But there has yet to be humiliation like the type I’m suffering from today.
Because today, on this humid summer day, I am sweating buckets in a wig and poofy, plum-colored ball gown.
I am dressed as a fairy-tale princess.
In front of my longtime crush.
And her entire family. As they celebrate her little cousin’s birthday.
Wepa!
It’s the exact opposite of how I wanted to spend the weekend before my own birthday.
To be fair, I’m getting paid to be here—I’ve been working for the last year at If the Shoe Fits, a company that sends princesses to birthday parties and corporate retreats—but that doesn’t tame the mortification I feel. Not even a little.
When I arrived and realized whose house it was, I briefly considered running, heels and all. That would clearly be less awkward than reuniting with Sienna and the entire Aguilar family as the hired help, right? I could call my boss and tell her I came down with food poisoning and I had to bail, and then—
“Chloe?”
Sienna’s voice instantly froze my racing thoughts.
It was as light and kind as I remembered, even though we hadn’t spoken since the summer before freshman year. Her green eyes gazed at me from underneath ginger curtain bangs, and I was sent right back to the swoony girl I was in middle school.
Back then, it was me and Sienna and Ramona, and we were inseparable.
A perpetual late bloomer, I admittedly didn’t have many friends when I started at Elmwood Middle School. Thankfully, Ramona and I were seated next to each other in homeroom. I was instantly taken with how cool and mature she seemed, in her head-to-toe black clothes and dark purple lipstick. She had the kind of corkscrew curls that would make any girl jealous—especially me, who tended to have frizzy waves more than anything else. To outsiders, she might have looked intimidating, and she absolutely was. But when I spotted an Intonation sticker on her notebook, almost hidden among the sea of other band and political stickers, I knew I had an in.
Even though cheesy pop bands didn’t seem like the kind of thing Ramona would love, she was drawn to any act of rebellion. Liking something mainstream as a girl who was anything but was the best kind of contradiction to her. We became fast friends, even though we weren’t that alike. Though we both enjoyed art and Intonation, if I was a bright, sunny day, she was a storm cloud. Yet we worked. I loved annoying her with my positivity, and she loved rolling her eyes at me. We bonded quickly over only having one parent, too—I had my dad, she had her mom.
It wasn’t long before we added Sienna into the mix. Middle-school Sienna was all long, lanky limbs and bright red hair, and she had what some might call an overt obsession with Intonation. As in, she couldn’t talk about much else except the band. She even showed up to school one day in an Intonation shirt. When someone made fun of her, Ramona swooped in and claimed Sienna as ours, and that was that.
Intonation provided the much-needed gateway for the three of us to form real, legitimate bonds. In between our obsession with the band, we had sleepovers and manicures, makeovers and movie nights. We even daydreamed about having our own girl group—who would someday open for Intonation on tour, obviously—called Deadly Flora. My girl-group alter ego was called Oleander, Sienna was Hydrangea, and Ramona was Nightshade—and yes, we had choreographed dance moves and a couple of our own songs. It was silly and it was the best.
My dad would jokingly call us La Tripleta (after the Puerto Rican twist on a Cubano sandwich) because he felt like we were three parts of a whole. Sometimes it really felt that way. Where there was one of us, there were the other two. We embraced it, sharing everything from lipsticks to secrets to crushes.
It just so happened that my crush was Sienna.
I still remember the moment my heart decided all it wanted was to be hers. We went on a field trip to the local science museum, and, in the gift shop, Sienna discovered a single teddy bear among the sea of plushies whose ears had been sewn on backward. She felt so sorry for it that she bought it and promised to give it a good home forever—even though some of our classmates snickered seeing her, at twelve, carrying a bear onto the bus.
I, however, was totally smitten. How could I not be, when she was so openhearted and secure in herself?
I started thinking of Sienna as this perfect being I was lucky to be near, which I know now is probably not very healthy. But I couldn’t help it. I wanted to be with her, yes, but I wanted to be close to her more, so I kept my crush to myself and leaned into the pining, telling myself I was okay just being friends. And I was. Because Sienna and Ramona were my best friends. But…
From Crystal Maldonado:
The cover was illustrated by the wildly talented artist Nia / Peach Pod, and I am in love with how she captured these three girls: Chloe and her beautiful, lavender hair at the center, surrounded by her besties, Ramona, on the left, and Sienna, on the right. Nia created something that is soft, ethereal, and captures the essence of girlhood and friendship and maybe-more-than-friends feelings.
A loose retelling of the (iconic) 2002 film, “Crossroads,” this book is a queer love story about girlhood, friendships, and the bittersweet experience of growing up. I wanted to explore the ways our friends can ground us, uplift us, and get us through anything… including, sometimes, all-encompassing crushes on each other.
“Grow Up, Chloe Torres” is for the fangirls — for those of us who have loved things with our whole hearts, who played with Barbies a little longer than our peers, who stepped into adulthood with caution, and who felt nostalgic from the time we were born.
More About Crystal Maldonado
Crystal Maldonado is a young adult author with a lot of feelings. She is the author of romcoms for fat, brown girls, including The Fall of Whit Rivera, which People Magazine called a “pumpkin-spice-latte-flavored treat”; Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, which was a New England Book Award winner, a Cosmopolitan Best New Book, and a Kirkus Best YA Fiction of 2021; and No Filter and Other Lies, which was named a POPSUGAR and Seventeen Best New YA. Her middle grade debut, Camp Sylvania: Moon Madness—a paranormal summer camp story featuring two fat besties, co-written with #1 New York Times bestselling author Julie Murphy—releases in spring 2024.
By day, Crystal works in higher ed marketing, and by night, she’s a writer who loves Beyoncé, glitter, shopping, and spending too much time on her phone. Her work has been published in Latina, BuzzFeed, and the Hartford Courant. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and dog. Follow her everywhere @crystalwrote or visit her website at crystalwrote.com.
From Get Real, Chloe Torres by Crystal Maldonado. Used with the permission of the publisher, Holiday House.
