LIZZY LIN SETS THE WORLD STRAIGHT

Lizzy is angry and combative when it comes to accepting her Chinese heritage in Nieber’s middle-grade novel.

Abandoned in China as a baby, Lizzy has grown up in America, where she feels she has “never felt excluded. To be honest, [she] never felt Asian.” Lizzy’s adoptive American mother has tried—too hard, in the tween’s view—to give her some experience of her Chinese cultural heritage. Lizzy resists these efforts; to her, soccer, at which she excels, is much more important than learning classical Chinese dance. When her initial efforts to be friendly with “real Chinese girls” in the dance class fail, she determines to succeed at dancing, just to show them, but she faces vile prejudice. Lizzy enlists her knowledgeable “sorta sister” Zoe to help, although the results confound Lizzy’s expectations and lead to a serious rift with her sibling. At school, an insensitive ancestry tree assignment makes everything worse, but it eventually sparks Lizzy’s creative side. She struggles to figure out her own emotions, and to share them, but then her Grandma Sophie recounts her own similar childhood distress at being called an “Oreo” and rouses Lizzy to fight. A threat to Lizzy’s soccer supremacy adds suspense and thematic relevance as she contends with a boorish boy with problems of his own. The protagonist’s complex feelings drive this sympathetic but cleareyed story of navigating a dual inheritance, and Nieber’s style is confident in this book, with convincing dialogue. Lizzy’s feisty spirit shines through as she deals with emotional ups and downs. That said, adults are often portrayed as unrealistically dim, and some parents are depicted as actively cruel. Still, two-culture kids are sure to find aspects that resonate with them, and soccer fans will enjoy the many specific references to their sport.

An absorbing account of grappling with identity.