Ryan Calejo was born and raised in south Florida. He recently graduated summa cum laude from the University of Miami with a BA. He teaches swimming to elementary school students, chess to middle school students, and writing to high school students. Charlie Hernández & the League of Shadows (Aladdin) is his first novel. Charlie Hernández has always been proud of his Latin American heritage. Thanks to his abuela’s stories, Charlie possesses an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the monsters and ghouls who have spent the last five hundred years haunting the imaginations of children all across the Iberian Peninsula, as well as Central and South America. Charlie’s always been a pragmatist. Even barely out of diapers, he knew the stories were just make-believe—nothing more than intricately woven fables meant to keep little kids from misbehaving. But when Charlie begins to experience freaky bodily manifestations—ones all too similar to those described by his grandma in his favorite legend—he is suddenly swept up in a world where the mythical beings he’s spent his entire life hearing about seem to be walking straight out of the pages of Hispanic folklore and into his life. And even stranger, they seem to know more about him than he knows about himself.
