![]() The plotline that really stands out, however, is when Lina discovers that books can comfort the struggling, link people together, and create changes both internal and external. Yang covers a lot of ground, from immigrant experiences and socio-economic inequities to climate change and middle school angst. But with the help of her ELL teacher, the school librarian, and a new friend, Lina begins to find her confidence and her voice through reading. Bullied by mean girls for her English, she vows never to speak again. Why isn’t Lina in any of the pictures displayed in their home? School is worse. They live in a one-bedroom apartment whose back rent is due in six weeks. And what of the American dream? Her scientist father toils (sans green card) for a villainous, bigoted organic farmer, while her mother, unemployed since the pandemic put the nail salon where she worked out of business, makes bath bombs to sell online. Now she arrives in Southern California as a 10-year-old stranger to her own family. When she was 5, Lina’s parents and baby sister left her in Beijing with her grandmother. Furthermore, Hush’s first-person Southern-isms are overdone to the point of stereotype, and her voice seldom feels authentic.Ī Chinese girl moves to America to be reunited with her family. Hush’s problems are portrayed as simultaneously truly awful and easily cured child readers with difficult backgrounds will recognize the inherent falsehood. The magical realism falls short here not because of the magic, but because the rest of the story feels false from the very beginning, when a girl Hush has never met before becomes her instant friend, all the way to the contrived resolution between Hush and her shockingly terrible mother. Only sometimes pain is a warning signal, and so Hush’s good intentions backfire. It’s then that Hush discovers that she can see people’s pain, manifest as small red worms she dubs “pain imps,” and by removing them, heal people. When she’s caught, local folks send her to live with a pregnant gardener, Mabel, instead of juvie. She makes a habit of stealing small items from stores but declines to help her abusive mother’s angry boyfriend take part in real crime. A 12-year-old delinquent discovers healing powers in Harkey’s second book set in a magical, quaint Southern town.īelle Cantrell, better known as Hush, lives in ’Bagoville, a derelict RV park outside the seemingly mostly white community of Sass, Georgia. ![]()
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