Anna-Marie McLemore is a Mexican-American author of young adult fiction magical realism, best known for their Stonewall Honor-winning novel When the Moon Was Ours, Wild Beauty, and The Weight of Feathers.
[7] McLemore describes their work as inspired by the fairytales and stories they grew up with and their own background,[8] which is why many of their novels feature magical-realist themes, queer characters, and Spanish and French language.
[9][10] They cite Laura Esquivel's novel Like Water for Chocolate as one of the reasons they started writing[11] and names Carla Trujillo, Malinda Lo, Isabel Allende, and Federico García Lorca as some of their influences.
It deals with themes of discrimination and marginalization[15] in a magical-realist story about black magic,[16] and includes a generational feud between Mexican-American and Romani rival families.
[20] Their second novel, When the Moon Was Ours, a magical-realist fairytale about a transgender Pakistani-American boy and a cisgender queer Latina falling in love,[21] was published in 2016 by Thomas Dunne Books.
[25] McLemore's third novel, Wild Beauty, about a family of cursed women and magical gardens, was published in 2017 by Feiwel and Friends.
[46] Centering on 17-year-old Latinx, gay, and transgender boy Nicholás Caraveo, the novel reimagines The Great Gatsby to explore not just the deceptive decadence of New York, but the struggle to find where one fits in, representing themes such as the racism and queer lives of the 1920s.