Love and Rockets Library: Esperanza by Jaime Hernandez

Selected for the 2012 Over the Rainbow List of recommended books by the GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association

Esperanza, the fifth volume of “Locas” stories by Jaime Hernandez, collects the remainder of the stories from the acclaimed Love and Rockets Volume II, picking up where 2010’s Penny Century collection left off.

Taking its title from Hopey Glass's birth name, Esperanza follows the somewhat settled-down ex-punkette in her new life as a schoolteacher's assistant — which doesn't mean that her romantic travails have gotten any simpler. Speaking of romantic travails, Maggie's former squeeze Ray Dominguez meets, and becomes obsessed with, the unhinged but fiendishly sexy "Frogmouth," even as he becomes peripherally involved in a brutal murder. But the longest story in the collection focuses on an older and wiser Maggie, facing down her demons in a cataclysmically eventful return to Hoppers.