Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme where you chose a random book from your Goodreads TBR and show it off. This meme is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog.
This week’s book is:
When the World Was Happy
Title: When the World Was Happy
Author: Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Page Length: 416
Pub. Date: Sept. 29, 2026
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Synopsis: CheChe knows that he and his twin sister Emma lead an unusual life. They enjoy spending time with their parents and grandparents, love to read, and don’t have a huge circle of friends—and they’re happy. Then, just a few months after they turn seventeen, three gunmen show up one morning at their El Paso, Texas, high school, and everything changes.
CheChe loses a leg, and both he and Emma have friends who die. Suddenly, the world feels like a very different place. But what they find hasn’t changed—or has only gotten deeper—is their love for their family, their close friends, and one another, and as they begin to heal, they create their own little community, one that wields the power of humor, kindness, and hope.
CheChe finds himself doing all kinds of things he never expected from his junior relearning to walk, falling in love with the boy he’s nursed a longtime crush on, making friends with a kid he always found intimidating. By the end of this life-changing school year, none of them will be the same, and many of them will have found their voices in ways they never imagined.
LINKS: Goodreads | Amazon | BookBub | Bookshop.org
Benjamin Alire Sáenz (born 16 August 1954) is an award-winning American poet, novelist and writer of children’s books.
He was born at Old Picacho, New Mexico, the fourth of seven children, and was raised on a small farm near Mesilla, New Mexico. He graduated from Las Cruces High School in 1972. That fall, he entered St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado where he received a B.A. degree in Humanities and Philosophy in 1977. He studied Theology at the University of Louvain in Leuven, Belgium from 1977 to 1981. He was a priest for a few years in El Paso, Texas before leaving the order.
In 1985, he returned to school, and studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso where he earned an M.A. degree in Creative Writing. He then spent a year at the University of Iowa as a PhD student in American Literature. A year later, he was awarded a Wallace E. Stegner fellowship. While at Stanford University under the guidance of Denise Levertov, he completed his first book of poems, Calendar of Dust, which won an American Book Award in 1992. He entered the Ph.D. program at Stanford and continued his studies for two more years. Before completing his Ph.D., he moved back to the border and began teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso in the bilingual MFA program.
His first novel, Carry Me Like Water was a saga that brought together the Victorian novel and the Latin American tradition of magic realism and received much critical attention.
In The Book of What Remains (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), his fifth book of poems, he writes to the core truth of life’s ever-shifting memories. Set along the Mexican border, the contrast between the desert’s austere beauty and the brutality of border politics mirrors humanity’s capacity for both generosity and cruelty.
In 2005, he curated a show of photographs by Julian Cardona.
He continues to teach in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas at El Paso.
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R.I.P. Benjamin Alire Saenz.
I’m a Teen Librarian and this news was shocking to everyone. Much sadness.