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Overview
After a year of distance-learning, Emily Sofer finds her world turned upside down: she has to leave the only school she's ever known to attend a public school in Chinatown. For the first time, Emily isn't the only Chinese student around...but looking like everyone else doesn't mean that understanding them will be easy—especially with an intimidating group of cool girls Emily calls The Five.
When Emily discovers that her adoptive parents have been keeping a secret, she feels even more uncertain about who she is. A chance discovery of Emily Dickinson's poetry helps her finally feel seen. . . but can the words of a writer from 200 years ago help her open up again, and find common ground with the Five?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780593567012 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Children's Books |
| Publication date: | 08/27/2024 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.63(w) x 8.56(h) x 1.06(d) |
| Age Range: | 10 - 13 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
I’m Nobody
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Ms. Franklin wrote on the whiteboard
Um, you’re Ms. Franklin the class laughed
And you already know who we are!
That was back in seventh grade at the Meadowlake School where Ms. Franklin smiled and swung her long red hair back over her shoulder before reading us this poem about a frog in a bog she said was about being humble not seeking attention
She also made some connection to social media how everyone wants to be liked or seen all the time but how that’s not the meaning of life how true happiness comes from inside and from relationships
I Understood
What Ms. Franklin meant at the time but it really made sense to me once I started going to I.S. 23 where I want to be seen but also wish I were a little bit invisible like a lunar eclipse fully present but also masked by shadow
It Should Have Been Easy
To respond to Ms. Franklin’s writing prompt about What it means to be person but it wasn’t
I don’t remember what I wrote or if I even wrote anything at all I do remember a strong feeling
Rising inside of me like my heart was full but not in a joyful way
I couldn’t think of what to say my head felt heavy as if filled with lead my hands got sweaty just holding my pen
My palms smelled metallic like they did when I was little after swinging on the monkey bars in Washington Square Park back when life felt less complex just one hand after the other after the next the other one after that
Fact
One interesting fact about me is that
I learned to read when I was three not because I am a genius but because
I was afraid of animals the stuffed kind with cold button eyes that stared at me as I lay in my playpen or crib
Their plush fur and floppy ears didn’t comfort me the way my parents did so Mom and Dad put books in my bed instead and I clung to them the way other kids cuddle teddy bears bunnies and giraffes
Books
Each night I’d fall asleep with a book tucked under my cheek
Yum Yum Dim Sum or some board book about Lunar New Year or how to do kung fu anything Chinese because even then my parents were trying to show me how to be more how I looked
Words
My parents still laugh about the first time they saw me turning pages with my chubby thumbs sounding out words like
Cat Mat Sat Hat
in books by Dr. Seuss
I was only three but they could see
I was teaching myself how to read
Baby Like Me
It blew my mind! Mom always says
It blew everyone’s mind! Dad always chimes in it’s true not many people know a child who learned to read at the age of three especially an adopted baby like me who spent her first months hearing Chinese in an orphanage in Beijing
Someplace Far Away
Even today we three laugh about the time my parents first saw me swaddled in a red silk quilt pumping my plump legs like I was biking to the moon or someplace far away as New York the city where
I have lived ever since Mom and Dad brought me home from China
Mooncake
That was back when I still had rosy cheeks round as the mooncake I find waiting for me on a plate a Post-it stuck to its rim:
See you at 8!
xo Mom
On days when she has a late meeting my mom always leaves me something sweet from the deli on the corner or from her favorite bakery in Chinatown Hop Wen close to the Community College of Lower Manhattan where she teaches American literature
Keeper
Flicking Mom’s note into the trash
I rip open a fresh package of Oreos kick my Dr. Martens off toward the corner of the kitchen and call for Keeper
It’s a long minute before I hear
Keeper’s tags jingle faint like a distant wind chime as he grunts to get up from his bed by the bathroom his brittle claws clicking across the wide planks of our soft wood floor
Here, Keeps
I whistle shoving a cookie too fast into my face I am starving! I think then wince as the rough Oreo edge scrapes the roof of my mouth
Here, Keeps I repeat worrying the scuff with my tongue while he waddles over tail ticking slow as a metronome his whole body winding down like a worn-out clock
Cookie
Keeper snuffles down the cookie I hold out in a single gulp his watery brown eyes widen with surprise from the sudden rush of sugar before he shuffles over to his other bed beneath the kitchen table
Old as he is Keeper is still the only dog we know able to eat cocoa and not die our whole family jokes it’s the Oreos that are keeping him alive but we don’t laugh as hard about that one as we used to careful now about not jinxing him
Spent by the effort Keeper closes his eyes and sighs fluttering the cloth above his head with a puff of warm breat h as his ears twitch their way into the drift of a dream
Keeper and Me
Keeper and me share a lot of things like pillows and cookies and when no one’s looking dinner but that happens less and less frequently these days Keeper mostly sleeps and me I am usually busy dealing with life at my new school
Keeper and Me
Keeper and me share a lot of things like how we got our names mine came from Emily Brontë my mom’s favorite author and Keeper was named for Emily Brontë’s dog
A loyal mastiff said to be stout and strong as a wild boar he was probably still no match for the puppy version of Keeps who even as a beagle acted bigger than he was always erupting with joy like a wind-up toy you can’t turn off
Recently
Keep’s been acting a lot like me a little more quiet than usual a little more lost in thought about simple things like snacks and relaxing or complicated stuff like life and death or making friends which I never really had to think about until now
A Dog’s Life
The expression a dog’s life is supposed to mean boring and monotonous but that could also be a kid’s life especially mine
Back during the early part of the pandemic when middle school was school-in-the-middle-of-my-room
where I sat six hours a day on my bed as if marooned on an island in a sea of worksheets
My dad always not knocking and opening my door to ask how I was doing me always hissing Fine
waving him away out of frame so my classmates wouldn’t see him checking up on me like a freak
Freakish
It was freakish when the pandemic hit
Dad lost his job almost overnight at The Village Herald
where he’d worked since before I was born he said he’d been half expecting it for as long as he could remember but like Keeper
The Herald always just seemed to hold on
It was weird to suddenly have my dad hanging around looking like he didn’t know what to do with himself no longer needed to rush to the scene of a speech or a crash or a crime he had a lot of time on his hands
It’s hard even now to understand how everything felt so fast but also painfully slow for months we didn’t always know what day it was for months it didn’t always seem to matter
I See Now
I can see now that Dad was kind of depressed the way he became obsessed with taking daily portraits of me and Mom like if he didn’t record all the small changes in us he would fail to see some big shift before it came
How each night he’d stand on our fire escape snapping dozens of pointless photos of the moon as it waxed and waned
Looks pretty much the same I’d say
No way Dad would reply Look again
She’s completely different today
What He Sees
Capturing what he sees Mom explained to me
is how your dad understands the world I get that but for a while I found it extremely annoying actually intrusive is the word I would use
But since I didn’t refuse his daily portraits there’s lots of shots of me making a face or rolling my eyes which always made Dad flash a smile which is partly why I let him
Fate of the Earth
With the fate of the Earth so uncertain the sight of my dad’s passionate expression as he’s holding his camera and the light in his face when he’s taking a photo make the world feel like a safer place
It’s no wonder I’ve kept a picture of him like that in my mind sometimes I find you don’t need a camera to remember the important things you’ve seen