Author Interview: Legally Yours, Violet Lopez by Elba Luz

Author Interview: Legally Yours, Violet Lopez by Elba Luz

Legally Yours, Violet Lopez follows a high-achieving Latina student with a near-perfect record defending her peers against the disciplinary board who gets blackmailed into taking the one case she specifically refused. Enemies to lovers, class tension, and a protagonist who will figure out how to win the game even when someone else picked the table. Legally Yours, Violet Lopez by Elba Luz is out on October 20th, and we sat down with Elba for some questions!

Legally Yours, Violet Lopez

by Elba Luz
Published by: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
on October 20, 2026
Genres: Contemporary Romance, Young Adult
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A serious and studious teen reluctantly agrees to defend her elite private school’s lazy golden boy in this young adult rom-com with courtroom intrigue, an opposites attract romance, and witty banter.

Violet Lopez has planned exactly how her life will go: She’ll graduate valedictorian, attend Harvard, and become a big shot lawyer, all so that her injury-prone single dad can finally take a break.

As a member of her elite private school’s law society, Violet is proud to hold a near-perfect record of defending students against the disciplinary board. But when the popular and infuriatingly charming Theo Hudson is accused of a prank he swears he didn’t commit, Violet recuses herself from his case on the grounds of despising the school’s privileged golden boy, and not even a couple classmates’ offer of a four-figure payout to purposely tank his trial can change her mind.

Then Theo uncovers a secret Violet wants to keep under wraps and blackmails her into representing him. Sick of being pushed around by rich kids, Violet decides she can get sweet revenge on the arrogant jock and some much-needed cash at the same time. She’ll twist his alibi, lose key evidence, mislead witnesses—all while playing the perfect lawyer on the surface. Theo goes down, and Violet gets paid.

But the closer Violet gets to Theo, the more she sees beneath his devil-may-care attitude to someone caring and surprisingly sensitive…who she’s been planning to sabotage. Is it too late to change her mind? And even if she does, would Theo ever forgive her?

Violet can object to falling in love all she wants, but her heart overrules every time.

Interview with Elba

Violet has a near-perfect record defending students against the disciplinary board and then immediately gets blackmailed into taking the one case she specifically refused. How did you write her accepting that situation in a way that feels true to who she is rather than like the plot just needed her to say yes?

Every person, no matter how put together they may seem, has a breaking point. For Violet, she’s already juggling the pressure of trying to succeed so she can take care of her father, who has recently been hospitalized, while constantly being surrounded by people who have so much more than she does and seemingly so much less to worry about. She works twice as hard as everyone around her and still has a fraction of what her peers have. There’s only so long you can watch people move through life with every advantage while you’re struggling just to stay afloat, especially when some of those same people are rubbing that privilege in your face or trying to take advantage of you. By the time Violet is blackmailed into taking the case, all of that frustration has been building for a long time. It pushes her past the point where she’s willing to accept whatever people throw at her. So even though taking the case isn’t what she wanted, the way she handles it becomes very Violet. If she’s being forced into the game, she’s going to figure out how to win it.

You went from astrophysics to publishing to writing YA romance. Has any of the space knowledge made it into your books yet?

Not yet! I am currently working on a future project that will have aspects of astrophysics in it, though. In Legally Yours, Violet does have some of the same mentality I had when I was studying astrophysics, that desperate need to learn as much as you possibly can, paired with the feeling that there will never be enough time to learn it all.

Both of your YA books center Latina protagonists with very specific visions for their futures who end up having to reckon with what they actually want versus what they planned. How much of that tension between ambition and authenticity is personal, and is Violet’s relationship with her dad’s wellbeing driving her choices in a way that feels specific to being a Latina daughter?

Being Latina, especially as the firstborn daughter in a family that uprooted their life to give you opportunities they never had, can come with a very particular sense of responsibility. That was a huge driving force for Violet, and it comes from feelings I know personally. In my experience, family bonds in Latino households carry an enormous amount of weight. There isn’t always this idea that turning eighteen suddenly means your life separates completely from your parents. You stay close until you’re ready to leave, and sometimes even after you leave, that closeness never really changes, or you don’t leave at all. Family love can be every bit as important as romantic love, friendship, or ambition.

Violet is working toward this future partly because she wants to take care of her father, but she isn’t being forced into that responsibility. She genuinely wants to do everything she’s doing. She still has her own dreams and her own ambitions, and the future she’s trying to build belongs to her. Taking care of her father is simply woven into that vision. I think all these things exist beside each other.