Untraceable

by Aya de León

Overview

With gripping results, this companion novel to Undercover Latina returns to the high-stakes world of the Factory—an international organization of spies protecting people of color.

Fifteen-year-old Amani Kendall’s biggest problem is being the only plus-size Black girl at a white private school—until her house burns down and her family is unexpectedly on the run. Suddenly, she’s reeling from the news that her formerly boring mom is being pursued by an ex-boyfriend turned stalker, and her scientist dad has gone MIA. At the same time, she has to navigate an underfunded school in the city, suffering the cultural whiplash of being surrounded by other Black students, including the cute boy who’s an old family friend. How much danger is their family really in, and how untraceable are they trying to be? Her mom offers only half-answers and roundabout lies, so Amani starts to investigate. But her sleuthing has unexpected consequences, uncovering secret family legacies that will change their lives forever. A revealing prequel to Undercover Latina for existing fans, Untraceable also serves as a thrilling introduction to the world of the Factory for readers encountering this fast-paced spy series for the first time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536223750
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Series:	The Factory , #2
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 8.56(h) x 1.11(d)
Lexile:	HL660L (what's this?)
Age Range:	12 - 13 Years

About the Author

Aya de León is the AfroLatina author of Undercover Latina, a companion book set in the same world as Untraceable, and several suspense novels for adults, as well as The Mystery Woman in Room Three, a free serialized online novel about two undocumented Dominican teens who uncover a kidnapping plot to stop the Green New Deal. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and is active in movements for racial, gender, and climate justice. She lives in Northern California.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue
Los Angeles, CA
 
Riding on eight wheels turned out to be dangerous.
   I knew how to ride a bike and a scooter, and even to skateboard a little bit, but I had no idea how to roller-skate. I wished I had learned earlier. I worried that going skating for the first time as a fifteen-year-old could get ugly. But I didn’t have a lot of friends at school—no close friends at all—so when one of the few invited me to a roller-rink birthday party, I said yes, even though I was afraid I’d embarrass myself.
   I had done gymnastics for several years, so I wasn’t totally uncoordinated, but that was back in elementary school. I was definitely gonna be the only Black girl at the party, not to mention the only girl bigger than a size six (like, ten sizes bigger). And I’m tall, too. If I fell down, it would be a long way to the ground and a surefire invitation for someone to tell a fat joke.
   Since there was no way I was getting on skates for the very first time at the party, I begged my mom to dig out her old quad skates so I could practice. Yes, that’s right: quad skates, not Rollerblades. My mother was a teenager in the ’90s, but in some ways, she seems like she grew up in the ’70s—she is old school. Her feet were only a half size bigger than mine, so I figured the skates would fit with an extra pair of socks. The boots were scuffed black leather with red wheels. They had red toe stops and red laces. They definitely looked like something out of a 1970s disco.
   I headed to the backyard. It wasn’t much of a yard. More like an extended driveway—just a square of concrete with a small strip of grass on the side that was overgrown with weeds. Mom kept saying she was going to plant a garden, but all she had managed so far was to put up a plastic gardening shed. There wasn’t a lot of room behind the house, but I didn’t want to be on the sidewalk in front, putting on a comedy show for the white hipster neighbors this afternoon. I had almost an hour to practice before math tutoring, and I was determined to make the most of it. I planned to skate around our tiny yard, wheeling carefully on the concrete, while holding on to the fence for balance.
   I pushed the door open and stepped out in my double-socked feet. The skates were heavy in my hand, tied together and dangling from the knot clutched in my fist.
   Standing on our tiny block of a back porch, I pulled out my phone for a selfie. I planned to take a picture of me holding the cheesy disco skates for posterity. I would have taken a video, but the storage was nearly full. My dad was a climate-change researcher who traveled a lot and sent me tons of photos and videos. Plus, I had videos of me and Dad together that I watched whenever I missed him, and I couldn’t bring myself to delete any of them. It made my phone act buggy, but I didn’t want to entrust a single one of my memories with my dad to any type of cloud. Maybe I’d go through and delete some of them when he got home. Or maybe I just needed more storage on my phone.
   I put the phone in camera mode and was just about to flip to the selfie lens when I saw a man crouching by the shed.
   He was Black, or maybe Latinx, with a cap pulled low over his stubbly face. He was medium height and stocky, dressed in dark clothes.
   I gasped and clutched at the phone, reflexively snapping a photo.
   At the sound of the camera shutter, the man leaped toward me, grabbing for the phone.
   My dad often practiced self-defense with me, teaching me to push past fear and simply react—hitting, kicking, and punching. He also taught me to use whatever was nearby or in my hands as a weapon.
   That would explain why I instinctively swung the roller skates at the man, looping them in a wide arc and letting them crash into the side of his head. They hit with a thud. I let go of the laces and he fell backward, the skates tumbling with him, his body crashing against our plastic shed.
   What surprised me next was the look on his face. I expected to see rage, but his eyes were wide and his mouth was open in a grimace of pain. He looked afraid, upset, almost concerned.
   But I didn’t have time to worry about his feelings. I backed up toward the house until there was a good five feet between us. I kept my eyes trained on him, and my hand felt for the doorknob behind me. As he fell and crumpled, seeming to lose consciousness, I finally turned and rushed into the house, leaving him in the yard with the pair of skates, one of them on its side, a red rear wheel spinning.
   “Mom!” I screamed, bolting the door behind me. I tried to call 911 on my phone, but it was frozen. I stabbed at it, trying to close the camera to get it to wake up.
   “Yes, my love?” Mom asked as she came into the back hallway, wiping a trail of white flour off the brown skin of her cheek with a starched kitchen towel. “What’s all the racket? Did you fall down?”
   “A m-man!” I stammered. “He’s still out there.”
   My mother rushed to the window and took in the man in dark clothes, staggering to his feet. In the fading afternoon light, I could see blood dripping down from beneath his cap.
   Mom stood frozen, eyes locked on him.
   For a moment, he looked up at us through the window, again with an expression that didn’t seem right, and then he limped toward the front yard.
   “Don’t move!” Mom ordered. “Don’t open the door!”
   As if I would.
   I just stood there, my heart banging in my chest.
   She ran toward the front of the house—to call the cops, I assumed. I kept my eyes trained on the dark figure disappearing around the back corner of the house.
   “Mom, he’s—” I yelled in her direction.
   “Stay there and watch!” she yelled back.
   So I did. For a moment, I watched the spot where he’d disappeared around the corner. But then my eyes strayed to the shed, where a smudge of blood was drying on the plastic door.
   My dad was a scientist. I imagined him taking a sample to his lab and using his tools to . . . maybe help identify him somehow? Who was this guy sneaking into our backyard? Was he trying to break in? Or just lurking around?
   I had the sudden thought that maybe the guy was homeless and just looking for a place to rest. But no. His clothes seemed too new. Too crisp.
   I heard the front door open. Was my mother leaving?
   “Mom!” I yelled, panicking.
   “Stay there!” she commanded.
   So I stood rooted to my spot.
   My phone screen was still frozen in camera mode. In the lower corner was the last photo I had taken—a blurry shot of the shed with the man as a brown/black smear and my thumb taking up half the frame. I pressed the power button and restarted the phone, glancing only occasionally away from the window in the back door.
   My phone still hadn’t booted back up when I heard the front door slam, and Mom came running toward me.
   “I wanted to see which way he went,” she said. “I was hoping he had a car and I might get a look at the license plate. But he was on foot. Headed north, toward the gas station.”
   “Did you call nine one one?” I asked.
   She hesitated. “I—I didn’t.”
   “What?” I asked. Some strange guy was creeping outside our door, and she didn’t call the cops? Leave it to my mom to act weird and ridiculous.
   “I was going to,” Mom said. “I picked up the phone and started dialing. But then I imagined giving the man’s description to the police, and I realized it could describe your father. I’ve seen too many Black men get hassled by the cops in this neighborhood.”
   Like I said, ridiculous. There weren’t many Black men in this neighborhood. Maybe a few coming home from work in suits. I doubted there’d be any in dark jeans and a cap.
   “Did you remember the most important part?” I asked. “He’s also bleeding from a head wound.”
   “I saw that,” Mom said. “What happened?”
   “I hit him in the temple,” I said. “It was, like, whoa.”
   “Head wounds always seem worse than they are,” Mom said. “I can use my professional network to see if anyone comes into the emergency room tonight that matches his description.”
   Mom’s a doctor. She wasn’t working emergency, but I guess there’s some kind of doctor gossip network.
   I sighed. “My phone snapped a photo of him, but it’s blurry beyond recognition.”
   “Too bad,” Mom said. “That might have been worth taking to the police.” She asked me for a more detailed description, and I gave it to her.
   “And what did you hit him with?” she asked.
   “The roller skates,” I said.
   “My roller skates?” she asked.
   “Yeah,” I said. “It just sort of happened. One minute I was holding them by the laces, and the next minute they were sort of—”
   “Knocking him upside his head,” Mom finished.
   “Yeah,” I said, and a slightly hysterical giggle bubbled up from my chest.
   My laughter sounded strange in the narrow back hallway. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. I was sort of shaking but laughing, too.
   It was infectious. Mom started laughing as well.
   “Why am I laughing when I also feel really scared?” I asked between explosions of laughter.
   “From the looks of it, he’s the one who should be scared,” Mom said, and we started cracking up again. “I can just see him explaining to the ER doctor stitching him up. ‘Yeah, I was hit in the head by a teenage girl with a pair of roller skates.’ He really learned that crime doesn’t pay.”
   I rolled my eyes at her latest cheesy saying. Sometimes it felt like Mom only knew how to talk in clichés, but right now it was almost comforting. “I just hope . . .” I said, gasping through the peals of laughter. “I just hope he feels panic every time he sees a little kid go skating by.”
   The two of us sat on the floor in the back hallway, holding our sides and laughing, but I was definitely shaking the whole time.

Editorial Reviews

11/24/2023

Gr 6 Up—Fifteen-year-old Amani Kendall receives the shock of her life when she discovers her parents are secret undercover agents of the Factory—an international organization of spies protecting people of color. She and her Mom are forced to move suddenly when their cover is blown, and they settle with a family friend, Sister Niema. Amani, using the name Imani, struggles to adapt to the abrupt cultural differences in being surrounded by Black students at her new public school in contrast to her former all-white elite private school. Eventually meeting up with her missing father, the family must embark on a dangerous journey that forces Amani to make some tough decisions. Amani's voice rings true as a plus-size Black adolescent struggling to accept her own beauty in a world where skinny and white represent the ideal. She is her own worst critic; young readers will identify with her anxieties. Amani's thought processes as she puts two and two together about her parents steadily builds the suspense through the narrative. There are multiple social issues covered, such as abortion and racism. The plot is extremely busy, and it may be hard for readers to keep up with the rapid fire action. This is a prequel companion to the author's Undercover. VERDICT A complex Black girl sleuth uncovers a web of lies in this spy thriller. Purchase where the genre is popular.—Julie Shatterly

School Library Journal

2023-08-11
In this YA companion to middle-grade thriller Undercover Latina (2022), a Los Angeles teen’s family tries to escape her mother’s dangerous ex.

Fifteen-year-old Amani Kendall goes from practicing roller skating for an upcoming birthday party one day to starting over in a different school with a cover story and a fake name the next. Amani never fit in at elite, STEM-focused Penfield Academy as a “plus-size Black girl who wore African braids…because her mother wouldn’t let her flat-iron her hair.” But after Amani encounters a creepy man in her backyard and makes a police report (to her mother’s great displeasure), everything changes. Her mom picks her up early from school, informing her that their house was burned down, possibly by a stalker ex-boyfriend. Amani’s dad, a climate-change researcher, has been away working in the field for months. Amani and her mom take shelter with Sister Niema, who ran the Afrocentric weekend school for girls Amani once attended. Now going by Imani Kennedy, she starts over—with some negative preconceptions about her new classmates—at a public school that’s dramatically different from her old one. But she can’t help feeling like her mom is hiding something. This body-positive story has an exciting premise and addresses many relevant social issues. Unfortunately, the slow pace makes it difficult to sustain readers’ interest, and the book juggles a number of plotlines that don’t deliver on their promise.

Underwhelming. (Fiction. 12-16)

Kirkus Reviews

In this YA companion to middle-grade thriller Undercover Latina (2022), a Los Angeles teen’s family tries to escape her mother’s dangerous ex. . . . This body-positive story has an exciting premise and addresses many relevant social issues.
—Kirkus Reviews

Amani’s voice rings true as a plus-size Black adolescent struggling to accept her own beauty. . . She is her own worst critic; young readers will identify with her anxieties. Amani’s thought processes as she puts two and two together about her parents steadily builds the suspense through the narrative. There are multiple social issues covered, such as abortion and racism. . . A complex Black girl sleuth uncovers a web of lies in this spy thriller.
—School Library Journal

From the Publisher