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.