Win Me Something

I LOVED this book. Couldn't put it down, couldn't stop dog-earing, couldn't stop texting friends with snapshots of paragraphs and !!!!s kind of love.

Win Me Something follows Willa Chen - half Chinese, half white - through a formative year-ish of nannying for a wealthy white family in Manhattan and reckoning with her own muddled childhood. In the author's words, from the very first page:

“I had parents. I had siblings. I had homes, multiple or zero, depending on how you looked at it. I wasn't unloved, not uncared for, exactly. It was cloudier than that, ink spreading into water as I tried to claim the words. If you're undercared for, but essentially fine, what do you do with all that hurt, the kind that runs through your tendons and tugs on your muscles but doesn't show up on your skin?”

WHEW.

Throughout the (debut!) novel, Willa grapples with this pervasive feeling of not belonging, of feeling tolerated but never actively wanted, of squeezing herself in to the margins of other people's lives. (The way Lucia Wu writes this is fresh and resonant and haunting; the prose is stellar.) I was so compelled by her journey as she starts to name and explore and question these beliefs.

Strongly, strongly recommend.