By Kelly Yang
A ten-year-old immigrant girl runs the front desk of a motel while her family fights to make a life in a country that keeps making it hard.
Mia Tang's family has just come to America from China, and things are not going the way the ads promised. Her parents take a job managing a rundown California motel for a stingy, unkind owner, which means Mia, at ten, is the one working the front desk after school. She hides other struggling immigrants in the empty rooms, dreams of being a writer in a language she's still learning, and slowly starts to fight back against the unfairness she sees every day, one letter and one small act of courage at a time.
Mia is impossible not to root for, and the short chapters and constant small crises at the motel keep the pages turning. It's doing real work under the fun, though: it shows a child what poverty, prejudice, and being new to a country actually feel like from the inside, and it does it through a heroine who meets all of it with nerve and heart. Kelly Yang lived a version of this, and it shows. A thoughtful child will come out of this one seeing the world a little differently.