A tumble of words flows out of Patty Ho as she tries to figure out how to be 15, and half white, half Taiwanese, hapa, says her buddy Jasmine, the “Asian-ator.” The gorgeous Jasmine is one of the friends she makes at Stanford’s math summer camp, SUMaC, where she’s sent, kicking and screaming, by the mother she’s trying to escape. Patty doesn’t quite know who she is, or who her white father was, or why her mother is so controlling, so humorless or so bent on embarrassing her. Brian, her brilliant math surfer dude TA, and Stu, source of first kiss and first heartache, allow her some enlightenment, but so do her mother’s long-estranged artist sister and a box of family photographs that Patty’s never seen. Through it all, Patty never loses her nervy bounce or her need to tell it all as it’s happening. Great voice from a very promising debut. (Fiction. YA)
