Finally Seen

Kelly Yang's Finally Seen is a family story for 9 year olds about a girl flying across the world to a family she hasn't seen for five years.

What happens

Lina Gao was five when her parents moved to America. They took her baby sister Millie with them and left Lina in Beijing with her grandmother, Lao Lao. Now she's ten, on a plane to Los Angeles, and her heart is fluttering like mad.

Everything she knows about her family comes from their letters. A pale blue house with a white fence. A dad who's a scientist. A mum who works at a fancy salon. You can probably guess where this is going (the letters weren't exactly the whole truth).

The house is a small apartment where her parents sleep on a mat on the floor. Her dad works on a farm. Every surface is covered in bath bombs that her mum sells online, because the family owes back rent. Her mum has even started calling herself Jane.

Then there's Millie. She's seven, she chats away in English and Chinese, and she seems to know exactly how to make their parents happy. Lina can't even order a glass of water at the airport without her little sister stepping in.

Lina tells the story herself, and it's very easy to be right there with her. She's funny (she hears her mum mention bombs in the car and decides her family are criminals), but she's carrying a lot too. She feels guilty about leaving Lao Lao in a nursing home. She wants to hear her mum say I love you. And she badly wants to know why she was the one who got left behind.

Once school starts, English feels so hard that she decides it's safer not to talk at all.

There's sadness in here, gently done. Lina's grandfather has died before the story begins, and her phone calls with Lao Lao are really tender. None of it is heavy, but a child who's been through a big move or a long time apart from someone might see a lot of themselves in her.

If you've got a reader who loves a family story with real feelings and plenty of humour, this is a lovely one.

What to read next

And if they'd like more from Kelly Yang, Front Desk has another girl from China finding her feet in California, where her parents' money worries soon become hers as well.