![]() With these characters’ ages running the gamut from 12 to high school to mid-30s and their voices included in a concurrent third-person narration along with Willow’s precise, unemotional first-person narration, readers may well have a hard time engaging. Along the way, her fate intertwines with those of a confident high school girl named Mai and her surly brother, Quang-ha their energetic, manicure-salon–owning mother, Pattie (formerly Dung) Jairo Hernandez, a taxi driver with an existential crisis and a failure of a school counselor named Dell Duke. Losing her parents propels her on her hero’s-journey quest to find belonging. ![]() Outside of her parents, she has a hard time making friends since her mishmash of (also convenient, plotwise) interests-disease, plants and the number seven-doesn’t appeal to her fellow middle-grade students. Twelve-year-old genius Willow Chance was adopted as an infant by her “so white” parents (Willow is mixed race) and loses them both in one afternoon in a convenient (plotwise) car accident. ![]() A story of renewal and belonging that succeeds despite, not because of, its contrivances. ![]()
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