Among the top 10 best-selling titles in bookstores in Argentina last month were two novels with a romance title called "The Boy Who Drew Constellations" and "The Day It Stopped Snowing in Alaska" by an unknown author named Alice Kellen. In Chile, "Otra vez tú", by the same author. And in Spain and Mexico, "Nosotros en la luna", also signed under the name of this writer with an English surname. 

Alice Kellen is actually a young Spanish writer (Valencia, 1989) who has become a sales leader in the Spanish-speaking market thanks to her romantic novels that move away from the traditional cheesy and sweetened tone and aim to be a window to diversity, to break taboos and get closer to the female point of view, "which has had less prominence so far in every way", as the author herself said in an interview with Europa Press last month on the occasion of the presentation of her new work, 'El mapa de los anhelos' (Planeta).
 
In this novel, the protagonist is Grace, a girl who was conceived to save the life of her leukemia-stricken sister through a cell donation, but fails. When Lucy dies, it seems that the protagonist's life ceases to make sense. However, the appearance of a longing map, a game devised for her by her sister, whose first instruction is to find someone named Will Tucker, whom she has never heard of, will turn the story around.
 
"At the core of this novel is love, but also other themes such as family, loss, illness and, above all, the search for oneself," says Alice Kellen, who notes the evolution that each new title represents in her career.

In January of this year, the author published "The Boy Who Drew Constellations", a story of love, dreams and life. The story of Valentina, a humble young woman from a conservative family, who one day meets Gabriel, a studious boy from a middle-class family, brave and idealistic. Together they decide to love each other "forever", and choose a wall in her residence where the boy will draw constellations for her, each one symbolizing a significant moment of their life together, writes critic Claudia Sterling in Pulzo.

And she adds that "although this summary sounds like a pink novel, the truth is that it is not a sweet, sweet novel, but a realistic novel, which gives an account from a time when women were just beginning to be visible in areas other than the domestic, to have a voice, to have an opinion, until our time, all seen through a simple relationship - not at all boring - within a contextual depth that is surprising for its detail".

Since she began self-publishing her first novels, Alic Kellen has won over more than a million readers with titles such as 'It's Still Raining', 'The Day It Stopped Snowing in Alaska', 'The Boy Who Drew Constellations', '33 Reasons to See You Again', '23 Autumns Before You', '13 Crazy Things to Give You', 'Sophie's Wings'.