Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Front Desk comes a poignant middle grade novel about courage, hope, and resilience as an Asian American boy fights to keep his family together and stand up to racism during the initial outbreak of the coronavirus.
When the coronavirus hits Hong Kong, ten-year-old Knox Wei-Evans’s mom makes the last-minute decision to move him and his siblings back to California, where they think they will be safe. Suddenly, Knox has two days to prepare for an international move—and for leaving his dad, who has to stay for work.
At his new school in California, Knox struggles with being the new kid. His classmates think that because he’s from Asia, he must have brought over the virus. At home, Mom just got fired and is panicking over the loss of health insurance, and Dad doesn’t even know when he’ll see them again, since the flights have been cancelled. And everyone struggles with Knox’s blurting-things-out problem.
As racism skyrockets during COVID-19, Knox tries to stand up to hate, while finding his place in his new country. Can you belong if you’re feared; can you protect if you’re new? And how do you keep a family together when you’re oceans apart? Sometimes when the world is spinning out of control, the best way to get through it is to embrace our own lovable uniqueness.
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About Kelly Yang
Kelly Yang is the award–winning author of children’s fiction, young adult fiction, and young adult romance. Front Desk won the 2019 Asian Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature and the Parents’ Choice Gold Medal, was the 2019 Global Read Aloud choice, and has earned numerous other honors, including being named a best book of the year by Amazon, the Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and NPR. She immigrated to America when she was six years old and grew up in Southern California, where she overcame poverty to go to college at the age of thirteen and law school at the age of seventeen. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School. After law school, she gave up law to pursue her passion of writing and teaching children writing. She is the founder of The Kelly Yang Project, a leading writing and debating program for kids in Asia. As a writing teacher for thirteen years, she helped thousands of children find their voice and become better writers and more powerful speakers. She is the Honorary Chair of the American Library Association for National Library Week. Learn more at KellyYang.com.