BURN DOWN, RISE UP

For over a year, the Bronx has been plagued with sudden disappearances that no one can explain. Sixteen-year-old and Dominican Raquel does her best to ignore it all, keeping her head down and hanging out with her best friend Aaron while working through her budding feelings for childhood friend Charlize. After all, the police only look for the white kids.

When Charlize's cousin goes missing and Raquel's own mother is infected with a black rot that has no medical cause, the two are sucked into a strange new internet trend known as The Echo Game. But this is no ordinary game. Violence scars the place where it happened, leaving a permanent echo and Raquel must discover why the Bronx is burning.

To save her mom and her crush, Raquel will have one hour to search its tragic underside and kill the monster responsible or risk becoming part of the Echo forever.

In THE ECHO GAME, Vincent Tirado exposes the dark history of redlining and racist public works projects that culminated in the burning of the Bronx throughout the 1970s while also celebrating the resilience and community spirit of its residents. Raquel is a smart and tough heroine grappling with first love and her queer identity, which is relatable to so many teens. An #ownvoices queer Afro-Latinx novel that combines the incisive social commentary of THE HATE U GIVE with the camp horror of Jordan Peele's Get Out, THE ECHO GAME captures the current zeitgeist and has strong crossover appeal.

The author is a non-binary Afro-Latinx Bronx native. They ventured out to Pennsylvania and Ohio to get their Bachelor's degree in Biology and Master's degree in Bioethics. They have had short stories published in Desert Rose Lit Mag and InQluded.