2024 Eric Hoffer Book Awards Winner in Legacy Fiction
2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Winner in Multicultural (Fiction)
2020 International Book Awards Finalist in Fiction: Multicultural
Official Pulpwood Queen Book Club Selection for 2021
2020 Sarton Awards Winner in Contemporary Fiction

“This is a novel of great tenderness and great brutality—Debra is right inside of her characters’ minds, bodies, spirits, their souls, and doesn’t spare the reader either tenderness or brutality.”
—Alma Luz Villanueva, author of The Ultraviolet Sky, winner of the American Book Award

“Debra Thomas has deftly interwoven the horrors and indignities, as well as triumphs, of the harrowing journey of Mexicans and Central Americans to the United States, ‘bringing to light’ the commonalities of what by appearances are insurmountable differences. With love there are no borders.”
—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., and It Calls You Back: An Odyssey of Love, Addiction, Revolutions & Healing

“Luz is a deeply generous novel, steeped with compassion, [and] written with an open, observant heart. Our narrator, Alma, is enamored with math, and this book becomes a beautiful equation in itself—pain and hope and love adding up to a timely, magnificent story.”
—Gayle Brandeis, author of The Book of Dead Birds, winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement

“Debra Thomas has written a novel of beauty and the nobility of the human spirit in the face of brutality and overwhelming odds. It’s an adventure as well, full of vivid characters, most notably Alma Cruz, as wise and courageous a heroine as you’ll find anywhere in literature. Luz is a story we need to read now more than ever.”
—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen

“An earnest novel about the journey of a young Mexican immigrant. . . . A sensitive but unsparing coming-of-age drama.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“This reader was mesmerized by the depth of pain and love that guides this story along the trail of Alma's fearful journey to her hopes for her daughter.”
—Charlotte Robin Cook, Next Generation Indie Book Awards Judge

“Your novel is our platform to have a voice that has the power to soften hearts, to understand the suffering of migrants and the current evil system that must be reformed.”
—Father Richard Estrada, Immigrant Rights Activist, Founder of Jovenes, Inc.