Seeing Emily »

The stunning new talent, Joyce Lee Wong, delivers a poignant, lyrical novel about the experiences of a Chinese American teenage girl by a stunning new talent.

In the successful style of David Levithan's The Realm of Possibility and Sonya Sones' What My Mother Doesn't Know, this free verse novel introduces readers to sixteen-year-old Emily, one of three Asian students at her high school in Richmond, Virginia, and the only child of protective, ambitious parents. She loves her parents and has always strived to please them, but her interest in a sexy new student, her growing passion for art, and her need to break away without breaking her tightly-knit family apart, force Emily to create a web of lies that ultimately traps her just as tightly as her circumstances. Through her art she finds a key to freedom and a new understanding of her place in the world.

Joyce Lee Wong's dazzling debut addresses the complexities of the contemporary Asian American experience, the pressures of American high school, and the age-old clash between teens and parents. This touching novel takes readers on a journey in which parents, peers and readers ultimately find new ways of seeing Emily.

Publishers Weekly

In a highly visual, eloquently wrought first novel, Wong conveys a Chinese-American girl's coming of age. In free verse, narrator Emily, a blossoming artist, expresses her observations of loved ones (her concerned mother and father; her two best friends, Nina and Liz) and familiar places (like the Golden Palace restaurant her parents own). She also describes her view of recent acquaintances: new student Nick, who is destined to become her first boyfriend, and Alex, another newcomer whose Chinese parents are old friends of Emily's parents. Throughout the brief, impressionistic chapters, readers "see" Emily's urgency to grow independent as she turns 16, and at the same time, to try to keep hold of her heritage. Meanwhile, she passes through familiar phases-experimenting with make-up, challenging her parents, experiencing love and loss, and striving to reflect her inner self through two art projects. Not until Emily travels to Taiwan does she begin to understand that what she wants for herself is not so very different from what her parents hope for her. As Alex gently reminds her, it is all Chinese parents' dream that "their children...grow up/ to achieve their fullest potential." Ages 14-up. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.