Ella Cerón Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Ella Cerón
Ella Ceron is an editor and writer from Los Angeles, California. She lives in New York City with two black cats.

Ella’s work has appeared in Bloomberg, InStyle, Teen Vogue, GQ, and other major publications.

At no point while Ella was growing up did she ever think that she was going to become a writer. When she was a kid, she wanted to actually become an actor. She auditioned for Juilliard and Carnegie Mellon. Then she thought she might be a teacher. Maybe she’d be a personal trainer. She had no clue of what to do in college. Part of this is because she had to work her way through college. She had a full time job throughout her college experience in order to help her pay for just living in New York City.

So after graduating, she became a nanny, and while she was a nanny, she began submitting articles for free. She was not getting paid to write for websites. Then one of these sites wanted to hire her. She then realized that she actually got paid to write that stuff.

From there she has had many different roles. Social media editor, and an actual editor at MTV News and Teen Vogue.

Ella was born three days after Halloween. So growing up with a Halloween birthday party every year and that will inform a lot of who you are. Then you mix that in with her heritage, as a Mexican American, and Mexicans have this different tradition than Halloween, they have Dia de Muertos, and that’s a celebration of their ancestors and the people that are gone.

She always grew up with the best of both worlds, and then given it was her birthday, it was a triple time of celebration. She loved all of the Dia de Muertos celebrations, the Halloween costumes, and she loved the fact that it was her birthday.

So it makes perfect sense she is the way that she is, as she is a little macabre and a little bit goth. She was called Wednesday Addams when she was a kid, and is still called that to this day.

Earlier drafts of “Viva Lola Espinoza” were much more rooted in magical realism really playing with this idea of fantasy and what we know to be reality and bending these times. In the novel, there is a lot of playing with how magical realism events and things that seem otherworldly will be treated as very normal. The Gomez family believes they have a curse and people treat this as being normal along various degrees of the spectrum. Some folks are very fervent about believing it. Some people treat it like it’s ridiculous.

The curse became much more muted over her many many drafts, and it became much more of the real side of magical realism. Became so much more mundane and run of the mill.

Ella went to Mexico City just about every summer of her life. When she was a kid, they’d go every summer. So Lola and Ella have that part in common. Everything else was a sharp left turn for her. Ella was never sent to Mexico for the summer because she got a C in Spanish, Ella would get sent just for the summer period.

They would do some stuff in Mexico. They would go to the pyramids, which is Ella’s favorite piece of land on the planet since it’s so ancient and imbued with history. However there were other things like the Chapultepec Castle which she’d never seen before. She had never seen Frida Kahlo’s house until August of 2021, when she went during the writing of Lola. Part of this was because she’d go and visit her family, and her family is so huge that that was the only thing she had time for, and she experienced Mexico as someone that lives there gets to experience it because her family still had jobs and lives. Even though their kid cousin from America was around didn’t mean that they had changed at all.

So it was incredibly critical for Ella to experience a bunch of these more touristy things that she was writing about, since the touristy stuff is also what makes Mexico so beautiful, however so does the quotidian everyday stuff that she has known ever since birth.

“Viva Lola Espinoza” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. One young Mexican American teen that spends the summer in Mexico City, meets two incredibly cute guy, tries learning Spanish, and learns a family secret which changes her whole life forever.

Lola Espinoza is cursed in love. Well, not cursed exactly, since magic is not real, right? Lola heads to Mexico City to spend a summer with her grandma and meets Rio (flirtatious and handsome) she learns the unbelievable truth: Magic is in fact real, and what she had always just written off as bad luck is really a curse.

If she ever wants to fall in love without suffering the consequences, then she will have to break this curse. She finds this unlikely curse-breaking companion in Javi, who is a seemingly stoic boy that she meets as she works in her cousin’s restaurant. Javi is willing to help Lola out by looking into this family curse of hers, and Lola needs all the help that she can possibly get. Over the course of this one summer, which is filled with family, food, and two incredibly different guys, she explores Mexico City as she learns all about her heritage, herself, and the magic that’s around all of us.

Ella’s beautiful story is a reminder to us all that life lessons often come from outside of snapshots, schools, or books.

Insights and humor abound throughout Lola’s curse breaking quest, and readers are sure to root for this considerate protagonist while her confidence continues to grow. It’s a tender coming of age story about first love and family. One high-achieving teen learns that she has been cursed to be unlucky in love in this vibrant debut, with vivid descriptions of Mexico City and the effortlessly woven Spanish dialogue present throughout ensure a rollicking fun read.