Alexis Castellanos garnered numerous accolades for her heart-wrenching and beautifully rendered 2022 debut, Isla to Island, a middle-grade graphic novel about Marisol, an unaccompanied child refugee who left Cuba for the U.S. during Operation Peter Pan. Now she’s returned with Guava and Grudges (Bloomsbury, Sept. 3), a charming, spirited rom-com set in a small town on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula. Scenic Port Murphy has two Cuban bakeries run by rival clans, the Ybarras and the Moraleses. When Ana Maria Ybarra meets Miguel Fuentes on a college tour in California, she has no idea he’s a Morales cousin—until he moves to Port Murphy. Ana Maria’s dad hopes she’ll take over the struggling bakery, while her mom is urging her to go to college, but she hopes to study at the Cordon Bleu. Miguel secretly helps her photograph her culinary creations for a scholarship that could make her Parisian patisserie dreams come true. The young lovers encounter many bumps in the road, and their journey thoughtfully explores questions of personal autonomy and family loyalty, innovation and tradition, and more. Castellanos spoke with us over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your first two books are both so lovely—and yet so different from one another.

Isla to Island was a wonderful book to work on in so many ways, but it was also really challenging. It was inspired by my family’s experience immigrating to this country, and so I was having difficult conversations with my family about that and reading about the subject. And then I was juggling a full-time job and my own freelance design business. It was physically demanding. I was emotionally tired. By the end, I needed some kind of palate cleanser, and I knew I wanted to write something that was pure fluff—still pulling from those experiences of being of Cuban American descent but focusing much more on the joyful aspects and a part of the [U.S.] that I love a lot, the Pacific Northwest. It was a happy experience and exactly what I needed to heal.

I loved how seamlessly all the plot strands in Guava came together. Are you the kind of writer who’s a methodical planner?

I have [writer] friends who have color-coordinated spreadsheets. I’m so impressed—and every time I sit down for a new project, I’m like, I’m going to be that person this time. I’m going to take notes. I’m not a super-organized person in general; it’s very chaotic in my mind. I try my best to give myself some form of organization. A lot of my creative process is very visual, because I’m an artist. I need to see a picture: What does the Morales bakery look like? What does [the Ybarras’ bakery], Café y Mas, look like? I try to keep those pictures organized for worldbuilding.

But then when it comes to actual plotting, I call it the “onion method.” For this book, my partner at the time was working at Molly Moon’s—since you’re from Seattle, you know [the ice cream shop] at the Wallingford location on 45th—and his manager was telling us about a food trade he’d made with Grand Central Bakery across the street. He’d gotten a bunch of sandwiches, and in trade, he’d given them some ice cream. That was the initial seed of the idea: What if you have these two rival businesses, and everyone [else is] trading food, but you can’t? OK, why are they rivals? Who are these people? And then, slowly, like an inverse onion, I add layers to that question, and they build the world.

Food plays such an important role in this book—I got so hungry reading it! And I also appreciated how it was woven into Ana Maria’s family’s story. Do you have formative food memories from childhood that influenced the story?

I was pretty much raised by my grandparents. My mom was a single mother, and she worked overtime, so my earliest memories are being in the kitchen with my grandmother and helping her cook. I was her little sous chef. And the TV I watched as a kid at their house was the Food Network. My memories of my grandparents and growing up are so closely tied to food. My grandparents just let me loose in the kitchen, let me do whatever I wanted. [Food] is not only how I connect to the memories of my grandparents; it’s also how I’ve connected to my culture with them. My grandmother taught me how to make so much Cuban food—merenguitos, arroz con leche, bistec empanizado, ropa vieja, vaca frita…I was always there in the kitchen with her, learning and paying attention. How we connected was over food, and now, when I go back and eat those things, it’s this time machine—a wonderful vehicle for capturing memories and experiences. I wanted to highlight all the wonderful things that food can do: It can fuel a decadeslong grudge between two families, but it can also heal that feud.

You described this book as “pure fluff,” but you do show the complexity of Ana Maria’s life. Also, I think fluffy books often don’t get the respect they deserve.

This was a book I needed for myself to heal, and I hope it can serve that same purpose for someone else. I remember being a teenager and having issues with my own identity. Having a book about the joyful aspects of being a child of immigrants, being Cuban American, could be just the thing that someone needs. Publishing has an issue where it only tends to highlight the stories about our pain when it comes to being immigrants and people of color. That was something I was told time and again after writing Isla to Island—how important the book was. I don’t want to negate that.

I visited my high school [in Florida] last year to do school visits. When I went there [as a student], it was majority white. As a family, we experienced a lot of racism and xenophobia in that town. But our experiences are so much more than the painful parts. I remember working on Isla to Island, and someone said to me, “How can there be a happy ending if these issues of racism and xenophobia don’t get resolved in the book?” And I was like, “These people are going to experience that for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, there’s going to be dark times in your life, but that doesn’t take away from the wonderful things that happen.”

I think it’s just as important to highlight those parts of immigrant experiences and the experiences of people of color, because they hold just as much weight. It seems like the perfect complement to Isla to have Guava. I joke that this is a book about being a teenager whose parents never went to therapy, because the parents aren’t perfect. They’re humans; they have unresolved issues. They have generational trauma that’s impacting their daughter, and she has to work through that. That isn’t the focus of the book, that isn’t driving the plot, but it’s still there, and it still influences the story.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.