A Recommended Book From: USA Today * The Chicago Tribune * Book Riot * Refinery 29 * InStyle * The Minneapolis Star-Tribune * Publishers Weekly * Baltimore Outloud * Omnivoracious * Lambda Literary * Goodreads * Lit Hub * The Millions FINALIST FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE WINNER OF THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD From award-winning author Lysley Tenorio, comes a big hearted debut novel following an undocumented Filipino son as he navigates his relationship with his mother, an uncertain future, and the place he calls home Excel spends his days trying to seem like an unremarkable American teenager. When he’s not working at The Pie Who Loved Me (a spy-themed pizza shop) or passing the time with his girlfriend Sab (occasionally in one of their town’s seventeen cemeteries), he carefully avoids the spotlight. But Excel knows that his family is far from normal. His mother, Maxima, was once a Filipina B-movie action star who now makes her living scamming men online. The old man they live with is not his grandfather, but Maxima’s lifelong martial arts trainer. And years ago, on Excel’s tenth birthday, Maxima revealed a secret that he must keep forever. “We are ‘TNT’—tago ng tago,” she told him, “hiding and hiding.” Excel is undocumented—and one accidental slip could uproot his entire life. Casting aside the paranoia and secrecy of his childhood, Excel takes a leap, joining Sab on a journey south to a ramshackle desert town called Hello City. Populated by drifters, old hippies, and washed-up techies—and existing outside the normal constructs of American society—Hello City offers Excel a chance to forge his own path for the first time. But after so many years of trying to be invisible, who does he want to become? And is it possible to put down roots in a country that has always considered you an outsider? Thrumming with energy and at once critical and hopeful, The Son of Good Fortune is a luminous story of a mother and son testing the strength of their bond to their country—and to each other.

Celebrate Chinese New Year with this sweet story of friendship and family! In this story designed to engage early readers, charming characters combine with simple text, lively illustrations, and laugh-out-loud humor to help boost kids' confidence and create lifelong readers! Chinese New Year is the most important holiday for Alex and her family, so it's even more special when she gets to share her favorite traditions with her best friend, Ethan. Together, they join the Chinese New Year parade and get to help make the dragon dance. Then they prepare for the festivities by tidying up, decorating, and making dumplings. After that, it's time to open red envelopes, eat a great big feast, and enjoy the lantern fesival! Complete with fun facts about the holiday in the back of the book, young readers will want to revisit this story again and again. Exciting, easy-to-read books are the stepping stone a young reader needs to bridge the gap between being a beginner and being fluent.

In the tradition of Copper Sun and Chains, this is the stirring tale of a girl’s journey from Africa to freedom and from youth to womanhood, as recounted in this dazzling debut novel. Ayanna Bahati lives in a small African village when she is brutally kidnapped, along with her brother, and forced onto a slave ship to America. As Ayanna, renamed Anna, rises from the cotton fields to the master’s house, she finds the familial love she’s been yearning for in elderly Mary and Mary’s son Daniel—but she is also faced with more threats to her survival. Risking everything to escape the plantation, Anna manages to make it north and to freedom, eventually settling in the free black community of Hudson, Ohio, and educating herself to become a teacher.

“Em’s Awful Good Fortune takes its reader across the world and deep into the heart of its trapped, privileged, suffering, and, ultimately, invincible narrator.” —Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Set against the backdrop of the expat lifestyle, Em’s Awful Good Fortune is about marriage—love and family, work and compromise, betrayal and heartbreak, resentment and resolution. Weaving back and forth in time and between cities and countries, Em’s booming voice—fierce, funny, and relatable—is the engine that drives this story. Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Detroit, Los Angeles and Seoul—Em stomps her way around the world on the personal journey to reimagine and reclaim her voice. True to life, this is a disorderly journey—one that ultimately leads to a new understanding of partnership and the complexity of relationships. For lovers of books by Jennifer Egan, Sally Rooney, and Elizabeth Strout.

Daughter of Good Fortune tells the story of Chen Huiqin and her family through the tumultuous 20th century in China. She witnessed the Japanese occupation during World War II, the Communist Revolution in 1949 and its ensuing Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Reform Era. Chen was born into a subsistence farming family, became a factory worker, and lived through her village’s relocation to make way for economic development. Her family’s story of urbanization is representative of hundreds of millions of rural Chinese.

When Ji-su's mother is chosen by the emperor to be a seamstress in his court, Ji-su vows to learn to sew the beautiful Korean bojagi, or wrapping cloths, just as well so that she will also be summoned to the palace and be reunited with her mother. Ji-su's mother has been chosen by the Korean king to be a seamstress at the palace and sew bojagi, or wrapping cloths, for the royal household. It is a great honor, but to Ji-su it means saying good-bye to her mother. The only way for them to be reunited, Ji-su realizes, is for her to become a seamstress just as talented and be chosen to serve the king. Through the changing seasons, Ji-su sews, learning the craft from her great-aunt and practicing her stitches tirelessly. One day, she finally has the chance to show her work to the palace Sanguiwon master, who has the power to bring her to her mother or to dash her hopes of being reunited. Is her sewing fine enough for the king?

These warm, funny, and eloquent poems, spanning the years 2000 to 2005, by the celebrated author of Always Coming Home and The Language of the Night, showcase Le Guin’s many facets as a writer.

When Susan Conley, her husband, and their two young sons leave their house in Maine for a two-year stint in a high-rise apartment in Beijing, they are prepared to weather the inevitable onslaught of culture shock. But the challenges of living and mothering in an utterly foreign country become even more complicated when Susan learns she has cancer. After undergoing treatment in Boston, she returns to Beijing, again as a foreigner—but this time, it’s her own body in which she feels like a stranger. Set against the eternally fascinating backdrop of modern China and full of insight into the trickiest questions of motherhood, this poignant memoir is a celebration of family and a candid exploration of mortality and belonging.

In the exotic interstellar civilization of the Second Starfaring Age, youthful wanderers are known as Children of Fortune. This is the tale of one such wanderer, who seeks her destiny on an odyssey of self-discovery amid humanity's many worlds.

A Cloak of Good Fortune traces one Cambodian child's coming of age from the idyllic, peaceful years of childhood in rural Cambodia through his family's forced exile. by the Khmer Rouge. Sieu. Sean Do was born in 1963 and grew up in Kampong Speu, a rural town about fifty kilometers outside Phnom Penh. The midwife declared Sieu Sean a rare family blessing because he was born inside the amniotic sac, and. in Khmer folklore, the sac is believed to be a "cloak of good fortune" that brings good luck. No one knew then how much luck the family would ultimately need.