 Join us in congratulating Sandra Proudman for the birthday of her book Salvación. We sat down with Sandra to learn more about her beautiful book! Sandra, welcome to this Las Musas blog interview. Please tell us about this project. In this Latinx YA fantasy debut inspired by El Zorro, Lola de La Peña becomes the masked heroine Salvación in order to save her family and town from a man who would destroy it for the magic it contains ... if she doesn’t fall in love with a boy in his company first. What inspired you to become a writer? Like so many authors, I’ve been inspired by a love of storytelling and reading since a very young age. Both my mom and dad love to read, and I grew up going to the library all of the time and picking out books to take home (libraries are so special!!!). It was one of my favorite things to do along with going to book fairs, and there’s something about reading that stuck with me throughout my early years; I was definitely the kid reading during recess in middle school and the teen that English teachers lent extra books to in high school. I’ve always loved writing and wrote my very first partial when I was thirteen (lol on that, though I still have it!), but it wasn’t until one Spring Break after I’d already graduated from college, gotten married, and was living in South Lake Tahoe, that I completed the very first draft of my first novel. That novel is still very much tucked away after it got chewed up in the query trenches, but since then, not only did I want to become an author, but I also knew that I had the ability to complete manuscripts and have been working so hard toward the goal ever since. How would you describe your main character? Why did you create your character that way? Lola or, as her family calls her, Loli, is something who is extremely fierce and completely loyal to doing the right thing. I wanted to create a character that was of course true to the nature of Zorro, someone who always fights for what’s right and is the true meaning of a hero. I loved getting to write someone who does flawed things, but who isn’t morally gray; just a feminist Mexican girl who is willing to stand up for what’s right even against her own family. What message are you hoping readers will take away from this story? The story has a lot of layers in it, but a couple I want to highlight are: 1) How important family is, but also how important it is that you as an individual have your own perspective on life not influenced fully by your family, so that you know that you can carve your own path toward the future that you want for yourself and those that come after. 2) How important it is to acknowledge factual history and keep it alive through storytelling in a way that does not give any party an out in the terrible things that happened to the Indigenous populations in California and throughout the continent and has historically continued to happen to Indigenous cultures. What comes next for you as an author? I am so excited to be working on new secret things!!! I WILL have a 2026 release. Though I can’t talk about it yet, I hope to be able to do so soon, and might even have by the time SALVACIÓN is released. And I am ALWAYS working on anything that I can, so although I am sticking in the young adult realm for a while, I have also been trying to get into the picture book world, inspired by my toddler, and a true love for picture books. What books are on your to-be-read list? There are always just too many amazing books, but I will say that Las Musas YA debuts came in especially fierce for 2025, and are all still novels that I am hoping to devour once I’m through with launching SALVACIÓN:
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