Equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful, Tiger Daughter is an award-winning novel about finding your voice amidst the pressures of growing up in an immigrant home told from the perspective of a remarkable young Chinese girl.Wen Zhou is a first generation daughter of Chinese migrant parents. She has high expectations from her parents to succeed in school, especially her father whose strict rules leave her feeling trapped. She dreams of creating a future for herself more satisfying than the one her parents expect her to lead. Then she befriends a boy named Henry who is also a first generation immigrant. He is the smartest boy at school despite struggling with his English and understands her in a way nobody has lately. Both of them dream of escaping and together they come up with a plan to take an entrance exam for a selective school far from home. But when tragedy strikes, it will take all of Wen’s resilience and tiger strength to get herself and Henry through the storm that follows.
Family problems
Hopeless In Hope
We live in a hopeless old house on an almost-deserted dead end street in a middle of nowhere town named Hope. This is the oldest part of Hope; eventually it will all be torn down and rebuilt into perfect homes for perfect people. Until then, we live here: imperfect people on an imperfect street that everyone forgets about. For Eva Brown, life feels lonely and small. Her mother, Shirley, drinks and yells all the time. She’s the target of the popular mean girl, and her only friend doesn’t want to talk to her anymore. All of it would be unbearable if it weren’t for her cat, Toofie, her beloved nohkum, and her writing, which no one will ever see.
When Nohkum is hospitalized, Shirley struggles to keep things together for Eva and her younger brother, Marcus. After Marcus is found wandering the neighbourhood alone, he is sent to live with a foster family, and Eva finds herself in a group home. Furious at her mother, Eva struggles to adjust and being reunited with her family seems less and less likely. During a visit to the hospital, Nohkum gives Eva Shirley’s diary. Will the truths it holds help Eva understand her mother?
Bloodline
Seventeen-year-old Abraham is in love, but his girlfriend and the grandmother who raised him are worried about his fighting, and things only get worse when his uncle introduces him to boxing.
Raymie Nightingale
Hoping that if she wins a local beauty pageant her father will come home, Raymie practices twirling a baton and performing good deeds as she is drawn into an unlikely friendship with a drama queen and a saboteur.
See the review at WOW Review, Volume 8, Issue 4
Lock & Mori
In modern-day London, sixteen-year-old Miss James “Mori” Moriarty is looking for an escape from her recent past and spiraling home life when she takes classmate Sherlock Holmes up on his challenge to solve a murder mystery.
The Other Side of Silence
Hero, a girl who does not speak, begins to do odd-jobs for her enigmatic neighbor, Miss Credence, whose house holds a shocking secret, at the same time that Hero’s sister returns home with an abandoned boy and another secret.
The Tricksters
While gathered together for the Christmas holiday, a large New Zealand family and their various guests and hangers-on find their lives suddenly invaded by three fascinating but rather sinister brothers and by New Year nothing is the same again.
Jasper Jones
Charlie Bucktin, a bookish thirteen year old, is startled one summer night by an urgent knock on his bedroom window. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in their small mining town, and he has come to ask for Charlie’s help. Terribly afraid but desperate to impress, Charlie follows him into the night.Jasper takes him to his secret glade, where Charlie witnesses Jasper’s horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion. He locks horns with his tempestuous mother, falls nervously in love, and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.
Shadow of the Leopard
Sofia, who lost her legs as a child, is now grown up with children in Mozambique, but when she discovers that Armando, the father of her children, is cheating on her, she leaves him, igniting his terrible rage.
Surrender
As he is dying, a twenty-year-old man known as Gabriel recounts his troubled childhood and his strange relationship with a dangerous counterpart named Finningan.