By Linda Sue Park
A half-Chinese girl and her white father try to build a new life in a frontier town that doesn't want her there.
It's 1880, and Hanna and her Papa arrive in a dusty Dakota town to start over and open a dress-goods shop. Hanna is half-Chinese, half-white, and she wants what any girl her age wants: to finish school, to make a friend, to help sew the beautiful dresses she keeps designing in her head. But the town takes one look at her face and decides she doesn't belong, parents pull their children from school, customers whisper, and one frightening afternoon two men corner her. Through all of it, Hanna holds onto her mother's memory and her own quiet determination. If your child grew up on the Little House books, this is the same frontier seen through the eyes of a girl those books left out.
This book asks your child to hold two things at once: the beauty of the frontier and the ugliness of how that frontier treated anyone who looked different. It's a natural next step on the trail because the history is no longer in the background, the racism Hanna faces is the story, named plainly and felt on every page. Park writes it with such care, and Hanna is such steady, good company, that a child can sit with hard truths without being overwhelmed. For any reader raised on pioneer stories, it's a powerful way to see them again.