Tag: Angela Ahn

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Halloween Books: Get into the Spirit with Books for Young Readers

It’s officially spooky season! Get into the Halloween spirit with our lists of bewitching tales for all ages. This week, check out our list of stories to share with the young ghouls in your life!

Early Graphic Novels

A Super Scary Narwhalloween: A Narwhal and Jelly Book #8
By Ben Clanton
76 Pages | Ages 6-9 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735266742 | Tundra Books
In the hilarious eighth book of this blockbuster graphic novel series, Narwhal and Jelly celebrate the spookiest time of the year – Halloween – with a super twist! Dive into three new stories that are sure to fright and delight! Narwhal loves Halloween – it’s a great excuse to dress up in a spooky and silly costume, like a ghost, a mermaid, a banana or maybe even Marlow the Mustachioed Moose. It’s a skeleTON of fun! Jelly isn’t dressing up, though – he’s a little scared of this time of year, and would prefer to hunker down in a hidey-hole until Halloween is over. But when a scary sea monster makes an appearance and swallows Narwhal (gulp!), can Jelly, with the help of some super friends, pluck up the courage to save his best bud?

Super Family: Simon and Chester #3
By Cale Atkinson
96 Pages | Ages 6-9 | Paperback
ISBN 9781774880005 | Tundra Books
Welcome to the world of Simon and Chester, ghost and boy duo extraordinaire. Chester lives with his Grandma, his cat Mr. Pickles and Simon the ghost. Lately Chester has been feeling like he’s missing out when he sees other families out doing fun family things.  So when Chester gets the opportunity to join his friend Amie and her family on a trip to the water park, he is IN. Meanwhile, Simon is off to his yearly ghost conference, excited to finally have something to show off about (haunting his VERY OWN HOUSE, for example) to the cool ghosts. Maybe they’ll even accept him into their group! Will things go as planned? Well, let’s put it this way: both Simon and Chester are about to learn a thing or two about the old saying “The grass is always greener . . .” 

Chapter Books

Crimson Twill: Witch in the Country
By Kallie George
Illustrated by Brigitta Sif
80 Pages | Ages 7-9 | Hardcover
ISBN 9781536214642 | Candlewick
Crimson Twill’s new friends from New Wart City, Mauve and Wesley, are coming for a visit! But as soon as they arrive at Crimson’s house in Cackle County, things start to go wrong. At the rotten apple orchard, Crimson’s ripening spell goes horribly awry (what will they do with all that rotten applesauce?). Then, at the broom-straw field, Wesley cuts too much straw and starts to float away. And when the friends try to collect frogs’ breath for their spells (it makes everything wonderfully green and warty), Mauve gets a stinky faceful of it! What on earth is going on? The whole countryside feels like something big is about to happen, and Crimson wonders if it has something to do with Granny Twill and that giant cauldron of stew she made. Can Crimson get to the bottom of this bad-luck mystery? And, more importantly, will her city friends ever want to visit her again?

Evie and the Truth About Witches
By John Martz
64 Pages | Ages 5-9 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735271005 | Tundra Books
Evie wants to be scared, and the usual scary stories just aren’t doing it for her anymore. When she stumbles across a different sort of book, The Truth about Witches, she hopes she’s found something thrilling . . . but she’s forbidden by a kindly shopkeeper from reading the last page out loud! Naturally, her curiosity gets the better of her, and upon reading the last page out loud – a real summoning spell – Evie is spirited off to a strange land of magic, weird creatures, feasts, and actual witches! They’re not as scary as they seem, until Evie asks to join their ranks . . . and only once she does is her quest for true scariness satisfied . . .

Spooky Sleuths #4: Fire in the Sky
By Natasha Deen
Illustrated by Lissy Marlin
112 Pages | Ages 7-9 | Paperback
ISBN 9780593488966 | Random House BFYR
There are mysterious explosions near the old abandoned houses in town. Is it science . . . or is it something strange and ghostly? Find out in the latest installment to the spooky chapter book series Spooky Sleuths. Asim’s friend Max is in danger! Asim is sure some sort of supernatural being – a witch, maybe? – is after Max. Rokshar, the levelheaded one of the group, thinks the woman is a scientist using kids for her experiments! Either way, Max is in trouble, and it’s up to Asim and Rokshar to keep him safe. But when they get close to finding answers, Asim and his friends are attacked by fireballs. Is science behind the flying fire? Or is it a witch from Guyanese folklore? Find out . . . if you dare!

The Skull
By Jon Klassen
112 Pages | Ages 6-9 | Hardcover
ISBN 9781536223378 | Candlewick
Jon Klassen’s signature wry humor takes a turn for the ghostly in this thrilling retelling of a traditional Tyrolean folktale. In a big abandoned house, on a barren hill, lives a skull. A brave girl named Otilla has escaped from terrible danger and run away, and when she finds herself lost in the dark forest, the lonely house beckons. Her host, the skull, is afraid of something too, something that comes every night. Can brave Otilla save them both? Steeped in shadows and threaded with subtle wit – with rich, monochromatic artwork and an illuminating author’s note – The Skull is as empowering as it is mysterious and foreboding.

Middle Grade

Don’t Want to Be Your Monster
By Deke Moulton
304 Pages | Ages 10-14 | Hardcover
ISBN 9781774880494 | Tundra Books
Adam and Victor are brothers who have the usual fights over the remote, which movie to watch and whether or not it’s morally acceptable to eat people. Well, not so much eat . . . just drink a little blood. They’re vampires, hiding in plain sight with their eclectic yet loving family. Ten-year-old Adam knows he has a better purpose in his life (well, immortal life) than just drinking blood, but fourteen-year-old Victor wants to accept his own self-image of vampirism. Everything changes when bodies start to appear all over town, and it becomes clear that a vampire hunter may be on the lookout for the family. Can Adam and Victor reconcile their differences and work together to stop the killer before it’s too late?

Double O Stephen and the Ghostly Realm
By Angela Ahn
320 Pages | Ages 9-12 | Paperback
ISBN 9780735268296 | Tundra Books
Stephen loves pirates. What he doesn’t love is his name: Stephen Oh-O’Driscoll. He believes when his Korean mother and Irish father gave him this name, that it was just one cruel setup for being teased. Giving things the proper name is important, which is why Stephen thinks that it’s time to update the definition of “pirate.” They’ve got a bad rep, and maybe they deserve some of it, but Stephen still likes a few pirate traditions, like bandannas and eyepatches – he’s just not that into stealing things from people. He has the perfect new word: piventurate. A sailor who passionately seeks adventure. That’s what he wants to be. When he gets suspended from school for doing proper piventurate-in-training things (using sticks to practice sword fighting), his mother doesn’t let him sit around doing nothing, instead she takes him to a museum. At the museum everything changes. Stephen finds himself in a strange new place, face-to-face with a real pirate. A pirate ghost. Captain Sapperton needs Stephen’s help to cross to the other side, and his former ghost crew are intent on making sure Stephen follows through, whatever it takes. Stephen is about to discover the true meaning of piventurate, and much to his surprise, his adventure will not only take him farther into the ghostly realm, but also closer to home, where long-held family secrets reveal surprising ties to the spirit world.

Escape to Witch City
By E. Latimer
312 Pages | Ages 10+ | Paperback
ISBN 9781101919330 | Tundra Books
Emmaline Black has a secret. She can hear the rhythm of heartbeats. Not just her own, but others’ too. It’s a rhythm she’s learned to control, and that can only mean one thing . . . Emma’s a witch. In a world where a sentence of witchcraft comes with dire consequences and all children who have reached the age of thirteen are tested to ensure they have no witch blood, Emma must attempt to stamp out her power before her own test comes. But the more she researches, the more she begins to suspect that her radically anti-witch aunt and mother are hiding something – the truth about their sister, her Aunt Lenore, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances years ago. The day of the test comes, and Emma’s results not only pair her up with strange new friends, but set her on a course to challenge everything she’s ever been taught about magic, and reveal long-buried family secrets. It seems witches may not have been so easy to banish after all. Secret cities, untapped powers, missing family members – Emma is about to discover a whole new world.

Ghostlight
By Kenneth Oppel
400 Pages | Ages 10+ | Paperback
ISBN 9780735272354 | Puffin Canada
The story of the tragic death of sixteen-year-old Rebecca Strand and her lighthouse keeper father is just an elaborate tale Gabe tells tourists for his summer job on the Toronto Island. Or so he thought. When his ghost tours awaken Rebecca’s spirit, Gabe is drawn into a world far darker than any ghost story he’s ever heard. Rebecca reveals that she and her father were connected to The Order, a secret society devoted to protecting the world from “the wakeful and wicked dead” – malevolent spirits like Viker, the ghost responsible for their deaths. But now the Order has disappeared and Viker is growing even stronger, and he’ll stop at nothing to wreak chaos and destruction on the living. Gabe and his friends – both living and dead – must find a way to stop Viker before they all become lost souls.

Seven Dead Pirates
By Linda Bailey
304 Pages | Ages 8-12 | Paperback
ISBN 9781770498167 | Tundra Books
Lewis Dearborn is a lonely, anxious, “terminally shy” boy of eleven when his great-grandfather passes away and leaves Lewis’s family with his decaying seaside mansion. Lewis is initially delighted with his new bedroom, a secluded tower in a remote part of the house. Then he discovers that it’s already occupied – by the ghosts of seven dead pirates. Worse, the ghosts expect him to help them re-take their ship, now restored and on display in a local museum, so they can make their way to Libertalia, a legendary pirate utopia. The only problem is that this motley crew hasn’t left the house in almost two hundred years and is terrified of going outside. As Lewis warily sets out to assist his new roommates – a raucous, unruly bunch who exhibit a strange delight in thrift-store fashions and a thirst for storybooks – he begins to open himself to the possibilities of friendship, passion and joie de vivre and finds the courage to speak up.

The Dollhouse: A Ghost Story
By Charis Cotter
360 Pages | Ages 9-12 | Paperback
ISBN 9780735269088 | Tundra Books
Alice’s world is falling apart. Her parents are getting a divorce, and they’ve cancelled their yearly cottage trip – the one thing that gets Alice through the school year. Instead, Alice and her mom are heading to some small town where Alice’s mom will be a live-in nurse to a rich elderly lady. The house is huge, imposing, and spooky, and everything inside is meticulously kept and perfect – not a fun place to spend the summer. Things start to get weird when Alice finds a dollhouse in the attic that’s an exact replica of the house she’s living in. Then she wakes up to find a girl asleep next to her in her bed – a girl who looks a lot like one of the dolls from the dollhouse . . . . When the dollhouse starts to change when Alice isn’t looking, she knows she has to solve the mystery. Who are the girls in the dollhouse? What happened to them? And what is their connection to the mean and mysterious woman who owns the house?

The Grave Thief
By Dee Hahn
344 Pages | Ages 9-12 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735269439 | Puffin Canada 
Twelve-year-old Spade is a grave thief. With his father and brother, he digs up the recently deceased to steal jewels, the main form of trade in Wyndhail. Digging graves works for Spade – alone in the graveyard at night, no one notices his limp or calls him names. He’s headed for a lifetime of theft when his father comes up with the audacious plan to rob a grave in the Wyndhail castle cemetery. Spade and his brother get caught in a royal trap, and Spade must find the master of the Woegon: a deadly creature that is stalking the castle by night. Along the way, he meets Ember, the queen’s niece, and together they race to solve the mystery of the legendary Deepstones and their connection to the Woegon, the queen, a missing king and the mysterious pebble Spade finds in the Wyndhail cemetery. This is a fantastic story of friendship, bravery, grief and acceptance.

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Tuesdays with Tundra

Tuesdays with Tundra is an ongoing series featuring our new releases. This title is now available in stores and online!

New in Paperback:

Double O Stephen and the Ghostly Realm
By Angela Ahn
320 Pages | Ages 9-12 | Paperback
ISBN 9780735268296 | Tundra Books
Stephen loves pirates. What he doesn’t love is his name: Stephen Oh-O’Driscoll. He believes when his Korean mother and Irish father gave him this name, that it was just one cruel setup for being teased. Giving things the proper name is important, which is why Stephen thinks that it’s time to update the definition of “pirate.” They’ve got a bad rep, and maybe they deserve some of it, but Stephen still likes a few pirate traditions, like bandannas and eyepatches – he’s just not that into stealing things from people. He has the perfect new word: piventurate. A sailor who passionately seeks adventure. That’s what he wants to be. When he gets suspended from school for doing proper piventurate-in-training things (using sticks to practice sword fighting), his mother doesn’t let him sit around doing nothing, instead she takes him to a museum. At the museum everything changes. Stephen finds himself in a strange new place, face-to-face with a real pirate. A pirate ghost. Captain Sapperton needs Stephen’s help to cross to the other side, and his former ghost crew are intent on making sure Stephen follows through, whatever it takes. Stephen is about to discover the true meaning of piventurate, and much to his surprise, his adventure will not only take him farther into the ghostly realm, but also closer to home, where long-held family secrets reveal surprising ties to the spirit world.

We can’t wait to see you reading this title! If you share this book online, remember to use #ReadTundra in your hashtags so that we can re-post.

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Cover Reveal: Swimming into Trouble

July 11th is National Swimming Pool Day! To celebrate, we are excited to reveal the cover of Swimming into Trouble, the first book in the new series Julia on the Go! by Angela Ahn and illustrated by Julie Kim, publishing with Tundra Books on February 13, 2024!

Cover Art: Julie Kim
Cover Design: Gigi Lau

Swimming into Trouble: Julia on the Go! #1
By Angela Ahn
Illustrated by Julie Kim
176 Pages | Ages 7-10 | Hardcover
ISBN 9781774881880 | Tundra Books
Release Date: February 13, 2024
As a member of the Vipers Swim Team, Julia Nam’s always in the pool. Mountainview Community Center is like her second home, not only because swimming at the aquatic center is her favorite thing in the world, but also because her parents run the center’s sushi café. Julia would much rather be in the pool than sitting behind the counter of Sushi on the Go! watching other people swim. She’s the youngest swimmer on the team, but definitely not the slowest. Julia can’t wait for Personal Best Day – the most important day for all of the swimmers. If their times are good enough, they can enter a big regional swim meet. But then the worst thing happens. A sharp pain in Julia’s ear reveals an infection and she’s forbidden to swim for ten days. How can she get timed during Personal Best Day when she’s not allowed in the water? Julia is desperate to get back in the pool, even if it means having to go behind her parents’ backs in order to do so. But Julia’s solution lands her in a sticky situation, and it’s going to require the entire community center to come together to help her out of it!

Also by Angela Ahn:

Double O Stephen and the Ghostly Realm
By Angela Ahn
288 Pages | Ages 9-12 | Paperback
ISBN 9780735268296 | Tundra Books
Stephen loves pirates. What he doesn’t love is his name: Stephen Oh-O’Driscoll. He believes when his Korean mother and Irish father gave him this name, that it was just one cruel setup for being teased. Giving things the proper name is important, which is why Stephen thinks that it’s time to update the definition of “pirate.” They’ve got a bad rep, and maybe they deserve some of it, but Stephen still likes a few pirate traditions, like bandannas and eyepatches – he’s just not that into stealing things from people. He has the perfect new word: piventurate. A sailor who passionately seeks adventure. That’s what he wants to be. When he gets suspended from school for doing proper piventurate-in-training things (using sticks to practice sword fighting), his mother doesn’t let him sit around doing nothing, instead she takes him to a museum. At the museum everything changes. Stephen finds himself in a strange new place, face-to-face with a real pirate. A pirate ghost. Captain Sapperton needs Stephen’s help to cross to the other side, and his former ghost crew are intent on making sure Stephen follows through, whatever it takes. Stephen is about to discover the true meaning of piventurate, and much to his surprise, his adventure will not only take him farther into the ghostly realm, but also closer to home, where long-held family secrets reveal surprising ties to the spirit world.

Peter Lee’s Notes From the Field
By Angela Ahn
Illustrated by Julie Kwon
312 Pages | Ages 9-12 | Paperback
ISBN 9780735268265 | Tundra Books
Eleven year-old Peter Lee has one goal in life: to become a paleontologist. Okay, maybe two: to get his genius kid-sister, L.B., to leave him alone. But his summer falls apart when his real-life dinosaur expedition turns out to be a bust, and he watches his dreams go up in a cloud of asthma-inducing dust. Even worse, his grandmother, Hammy, is sick, and no one will talk to Peter or L.B. about it. Perhaps his days as a scientist aren’t quite behind him yet. Armed with notebooks and pens, Peter puts his observation and experimental skills to the test to see what he can do for Hammy. If only he can get his sister to be quiet for once – he needs time to sketch out a plan.

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Tundra Telegram: Books That Belong in a Museum

Hello, and thanks for joining us at Tundra Telegram, the column where we dig into the burning topics floating in the ether and recommend some books to dive into and set your synapses ablaze.

This Friday (June 30), movie fans welcome back one of the film world’s greatest action heroes – Indiana Jones – with the new movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Harrison Ford will play the iconic daredevil archaeologist for the final time, as he seeks to recover a mysterious dial before former Nazis (he hates those guys), now working for the American space program, get their hands on it.

To celebrate the return of the swashbuckling Dr. Jones, we’re recommending some books for young readers that pair well with the Indiana Jones movies, whether it’s in their historic setting, love of archaeology, or penchant for bold adventure. Hold onto your fedora – we’re leaping into the breach once again!

PICTURE BOOKS

Picture books don’t get much more action-packed than The Magician’s Secret by Zachary Hyman and Joe Bluhm. Charlie loves when Grandpa, a magician, comes to babysit because he always tells a story, inspired by an object from his Magic Story Chest. Those stories see a younger Grandpa exploring pyramids, dogfighting with the Red Baron, and even encountering dinosaurs (!), and celebrate the importance of imagination. Plus, the cover even looks like Charlie has opened the Ark of the Covenant – with much happier results.

If you love Indiana Jones, but wish he was about six feet shorter and furry, do we have the picture book for you! Dakota Crumb: Tiny Treasure Hunter by Jamie Michalak and Kelly Murphy features a daring little mouse who scours a museum at night to find important artifacts – some of which may be food items and other litter that museum-goers have dropped.

And while we mentioned Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen‘s Sam and Dave Dig a Hole in the last Tundra Telegram, there’s no other picture book that more accurately reflects the process of archaeology: fewer bullwhips and motorcycle chases, more endless digging without reward, in which the digging itself is the reward.

CHAPTER BOOKS & MIDDLE GRADE

There are a number of wonderful middle-grade series that capture a similar sense of historical adventure as the Indiana Jones films, but also a few great standalone novels. One such book is Angela Ahn‘s contemporary coming-of-age Peter Lee’s Notes from the Field, with illustrations by Julie Kwon. Maybe a contemporary coming-of-age story doesn’t scream “Indy,” but eleven-year-old Peter Lee wants to be a paleontologist (which is close to an archaeologist) and – like Indiana with his father (and son, Mutt) – Peter has difficult family dynamics to contend with.

What is an archaeologist, if not a grave thief? Dee Hahn takes graverobbers and makes them heroic in The Grave Thief. Twelve-year-old Spade joins the family business of graverobbing, and he likes the work. But when his father incites an audacious plan to rob a grave in the Wyndhail castle cemetery, the family falls into a royal trap and an epic adventure begins that will take both bravery and friendship to survive.

How To Promenade with a Python (and Not Get Eaten) by Rachel Poliquin and Kathryn Durst is a nonfiction book – part of an ongoing series – in which a savvy cockroach shares tips and tricks to surviving an encounter with a charming predator (in this case, a python). The book doesn’t share a lot of similarities with the Indiana Jones movies, but we would recommend it to Dr. Jones himself, given how much he hates snakes (but nevertheless seems to continually encounter them).

A series that scratches the serial adventure itch in a very satisfying way is The Explorers by Adrienne Kress. Over three books, a risk-averse boy (Sebastian) and a girl on a rescue mission (Evie) team up with legendary adventurers The Filipendulous Five (of which Evie’s grandfather is a member) for very funny but perilous tales of danger, mystery, literal cliff-hangers, and animals in tiny hats.

Like the sound of The Explorers, but want a little more secrecy in the books you read? SJ King‘s The Secret Explorers series is here to help. The Secret Explorers are a group of smart kids from all over the globe who team up to fix problems, solve mysteries, and gather knowledge (and young readers learn a few facts in the process, naturally). In thirteen books (so far), they’ve searched haunted castles, traversed the Arctic, and battled plant poachers. And even better – their adventures are available en español. 

The Escape This Book! series takes Jones-like adventures – in the tombs of Egypt, the Titanic (too soon?), and even outer space – and puts the proverbial fedora on young readers. That is, the readers themselves are in charge of their fates, and must doodle, decide, and demolish their ways out of some of history’s greatest events. It’s like you’re Spielberg himself, directing your favorite action hero into – and out of – danger.

We have to include the Addison Cooke series by Jonathan W. Stokes, as well, as these peril-packed books have been explicitly compared to the Indiana Jones movies. With titles like Addison Cooke and the Treasure of the Incas and Addison Cooke and the Ring of Destiny, the books feature the nephew of famous researchers and museum curators who always finds himself kidnapped by some evildoer or another on the hunt for the same artifacts as his relatives.

If you take the serialized treasure-hunting of Indiana Jones and add in a bit of fantasy and magic, you have the popular Thieves of Shadow series by Kevin Sands. Five kids with special talents are brought together to commit an impossible heist – stealing something from the most powerful sorcerer in the city. But messing with magic sets off a chain of events that lead to aquatic quests, sentient artifacts, and even dragons. The third book – Champions of the Fox – hits bookshelves this November, so there’s still time to get caught up on all the thrilling adventure.

Imagine a vault so cavernous that it could contain all the world’s greatest treasures and relics, from mummified remains of ancient monarchs to glistening swords brandished by legendary warriors. Does it remind you of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Well, buried amongst the treasures in Professor Brownstone’s vaults, lie a humble collection of books, each filled with legendary stories from his ancestors. Those stories form the basis of Brownstone’s Mythical Collection by Joe Todd-Stanton. Each book is a separate, but connected adventure, as different generations of Brownstone’s family try to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx or undo the Gorgon’s Curse.

YOUNG ADULT

Even if you aren’t a fan of the movies, everyone knows the iconic opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana risks his life to get the treasure, all while facing many booby traps. Like Indiana, Cassy and her friends in Candace Buford‘s Good as Gold spend their summer hunting down some elusive treasure buried deep within their town, in a quest to get the money and save Casey’s family and her future.

In Go Hunt Me by Kelly Devos, Alex Rush and her friends like to make creepy films, and as they set off to college, they decide to create one final epic short film together. The destination? A remote castle in Romania. But just as they get the film’s first shot rolling, one of Alex’s friends disappears. Now Alex and her friends must escape the castle and its dangers, just like Indiana Jones and his father do from Castle Brunwald in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Pankot Palace is not necessarily a hotel, but we think the Hotel Magnifique by Emily J. Taylor is just as legendary and dangerous as that setting from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you’re looking to be whisked away to a location both glamorous and haunting, then you’ve found your next destination.

Almost as celebrated as the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark is Indiana’s line: “That belongs in a museum.” (A line that all fans know by heart, and hope will hear again in The Dial of Destiny.) Speaking of museums, Miss Peregrine’s Museum of Wonders by Ransom Riggs is the deluxe companion guide to the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series. Written in a way that makes you feel like you’re actually in a museum, this essential volume is ideal for anyone curious about the world of Miss Peregrine.

One of Indiana Jones’s first adventures as a kid showed him stealing the Cross of Coronado from treasure hunters in order to give it to a museum (in true Indiana fashion). While being chased by the treasure hunters, he manages to board a train loaded with circus animals and equipment. Although The Family Fortuna don’t travel by train in the book by Lindsay Eagar, they do, however, run a circus. Get ready to step out of the shadows and shine when Avita the Bird Girl devises a plan to perform the most delightful and disturbing showdown that you’ve ever seen.

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Tundra Telegram: Books That Are Everything

Hello, and thanks for joining us at Tundra Telegram, the column where we scan the topics shifting around in readers’ heads so we can feel what you feel and recommend some suitable reading.

The film everyone is talking about this week is the multiple-award winning indie hit, Everything Everywhere All At Once. The movie (EEAAO, to friends) has been crowned with awards for acting, directing, and editing from some of the most prestigious accolades the film industry has to offer.

We at Tundra already put together a reading list (back in April 2022!) connected to EEAO, but this week, we wanted to present a few books for young readers that speak to one particular theme in the movie: that of the second generation East Asian-American experience, and the conflict and hardships between that generation and their immigrant parents.

PICTURE BOOKS

The relationship between a girl and the grandmother in Jennifer Mook-Sang and Yong Ling Kang‘s The Care and Keeping of Grandmas is a lot less fraught (and way more playful) than that between Becky and Gong Gong, but the picture book looks at the sometimes disorienting process of a grandparent coming to live with the family. Luckily, our young narrator has a lot of handy tips for making sure Grandma gets proper care in her new home.

Famed and influential children’s illustrator Gyo Fujikawa was born in Berkeley, California to Japanese-born parents, and the picture book It Began with a Page by Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad chronicles how she had to make her own opportunities in a country where there were few for Asian Americans. Gyo worked for Disney, but soon her whole family was imprisoned during World War II. Then she later became a noted artist for young people, pushing against the publishing industry to illustrate children’s books that featured children of different races interacting with each other.

A girl’s embarrassment with her Chinese-born parents kicks off the acclaimed Watercress by Andrea Wang and Jason Chin. Like EEAO, the book represents a reconciliation of different generations, as the American-born daughter – first mortified when her parents stop their car to gather some watercress they spot on the side of the highway – learns to appreciate the fresh food they forage and their memories in their old country that inspired them to continue the practice in their new one.

Aside from love in a laundromat, what could be more romantic than love in the library? The true story of the author’s grandparents inspired Love in the Library by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Yas Imamura, about two Japanese Americans imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II who strike up a friendship that becomes something more in the camp’s small library.

CHAPTER BOOKS & MIDDLE GRADE

A fearful second grader is the star of the hilarious Alvin Ho books by Lenore Look and LeUyen Pham. Alvin Ho is afraid of nearly everything. And that fear connects with intergenerational tension when his GungGung’s best friend dies, and Alvin volunteers to join his grandfather at the funeral. Alvin Ho: Allergic to Dead Bodies, Funerals, and Other Fatal Circumstances sees Alvin face his fears to grow closer to his grandpa.

The past generation’s choices come to haunt the present in Tae Keller‘s Newbery winner When You Trap a Tiger. Lily and her family move in with her sick grandmother, but what they don’t know is grandma stole something from mythical, magical tigers in her youth. Now one of the tigers is back and offers Lily a trade for her grandmother’s health – but can you trust a magical tiger?

Speaking of sick grandmas, Peter Lee’s Hammy is quite ill in Angela Ahn‘s Peter Lee’s Notes from the Field, and the eleven-year-old finds himself conflicted about the silence in his family. But Peter, who has honed his observation and experimental skills in his efforts to become a paleontologist, tries to use his science skills to make a plan to help out Hammy.

Conflict over career choice underlies Stand Up, Yumi Chung! by Jessica Kim, as the titular Yumi Chung tries to convince her parents that she has a future career as a comedian. Her Korean parents want her to pass a scholarship exam so she can attend an exclusive private school. But when she stumbles into a comedy camp led by her idol Jasmine Jasper and is mistaken for another camper, her madcap double life begins!

Tiến, not unlike Becky in EEAO, is a second generation immigrant who struggles with how to tell his Vietnamese parents he is gay in the beautiful graphic novel The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen. But he loves his family and friends and wants to share his secret with them, so he uses his beloved fairy tales to navigate through the difficult conversations and choices in his life.

Sisters Stella and Luna (who are not bats) learn about their mama’s youth in the Philippines in Cookie Hiponia‘s We Belong, a novel in verse that combines the immigrant experience with Filipino myth and legend. The girls ask their mama about the Philippines, and she combines her childhood as a strong-willed middle child and immigrant with that of the story of Mayari, the mythical daughter of a god.

YOUNG ADULT

The feeling of not belonging shoots through both our movie and Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim by Patricia Park. Alejandra Kim, daughter of second-generation Korean Argentines, has trouble fitting in at her elite and progressive prep school where she’s surrounded by wealthy white classmates who don’t know she’s a scholarship student. Add to that, her father recently died, and Alejandra has a difficult relationship with her mother at best (if that sounds familiar at all).

Reconnecting with the roots of family she’s never known is central to Throwaway Daughter by Ting-Xing Ye (with William Bell). Grace Dong-mei Parker is a Canadian teenager who was adopted from China, who has little interest in her birth mother’s country until she witnesses news footage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Grace studies Chinese and travels back to China in search of her birth mother to uncover the story of what happened almost twenty years before.

Intergenerational differences – particularly attitudes around dating – are at play in Jennifer Yen‘s fun rom-com A Taste for Love. Liza Yang and her mother may not agree on dating, but they agree on a love of baking. So when Liza decides to help out at her mother’s bakery’s annual bake-off, she gets a shock when she discovers all of the baking contestants are young Asian American men her mother has handpicked for Liza to date (!).

Romance and mother-daughter relationships also form the heart of From Little Tokyo, with Love by Sarah Kuhn, a love story with a fairy tale twist. Orphan Rika lives with her bossy cousins and works in her aunts’ business in Los Angeles, but things change during the Nikkei Week Festival, when she begins to believe festival guest and rom-com sweetheart Grace Kimura may be her long-lost mother! Luckily, she also gets to work with cute actor Hank Chen, as she quests through Little Tokyo to discover the truth.

A Scatter of Light is Malinda Lo‘s follow-up to her acclaimed (and frequently banned) Last Night at the Telegraph Club, and one in a most contemporary setting: a queer coming-of-age story against the first major Supreme Court decisions to legalize gay marriage in the States. Aria Tang West is sent to spend summer with her artist grandmother after a graduation party mishap. And it’s there that she finds community – and perhaps even romance – with Steph Nichols, her grandmother’s intriguing gardener.

Frank Li, the protagonist of Frankly in Love by David Yoon, has a troubled relationship with his culture. Though he doesn’t speak Korean and has lived in Southern California his whole life, his parents still expect him to end up with a “nice Korean girl.” Accordingly, Frank keeps his relationship with the (white) girl of his dreams, Brit, a secret by fake-dating a family friend with similar parental problems: Joy Song. And you’ve read enough rom-coms to know what happens next. Can Frank maintain two relationships? Can he truly be everything, everywhere, all at once?

Tundra Book Group