By J.C. Cervantes
Zane would rather climb the volcano behind his house than face school, until a shapeshifter turns up to tell him the volcano is really a prison and the Maya god of death locked inside it has been waiting for him.
Zane Obispo is thirteen and lives out in the New Mexico desert. One of his legs is shorter than the other and he walks with a cane, and school is mostly a place where people are cruel about it, so he skips a lot of it and hikes the volcano behind his house with his dog Rosie instead. Then a new girl named Brooks shows up, and she isn't exactly a girl. She's a nawal, a shapeshifter, and she's come to tell Zane that the volcano isn't dead at all. It's a prison. Locked inside is Ah-Puch, the Maya god of death and destruction, and there's a prophecy about the boy who sets him loose. That boy is Zane. Who his father is turns out to be tangled up in the whole thing.
The Maya mythology is the pull, and it's a whole world most children haven't met on the shelf yet: Xib'alba, the underworld, gods of death, a full pantheon that has nothing to do with the Greek and Roman ones everyone already knows. But the reason to hand this one over is Zane himself. He has a disability, he uses a cane, and Cervantes lets that simply be true about him instead of building a lesson around it. It's why he's slow going up the volcano and why school is rough on him, and it does end up mattering to who he is, but the book never makes him brave because of it. He's also genuinely funny. And Ah-Puch is one of the best villains in this corner of the shelf, good company on the page even while he means every terrible thing he says.