Winnie Zeng – Unleashes a Legend

Winnie Zeng Unleashes a Legend by Katie Zhao is a story for 9 year olds about a girl who wakes her dead grandmother up by baking.

What happens

Winnie's eleven and starting middle school, and she's prepared. She spent the whole summer watching anime, practising roundhouse kicks and memorising the Sailor Moon theme song, on the off chance she turned out to have powers. She also tried to buy a sword online. Her parents put a stop to that.

Her actual problem is David Zuo. Same Chinese school, same piano teacher, one month older, and he's just beaten her by half a point at a competition for the second year running. Her mum brings him up at dinner. Constantly.

Then David turns up at her new school, and the first day gets a good deal worse.

The scene that'll stay with your reader is lunch. Winnie opens her Tupperware of mapo tofu and squid, and three girls at the table gag at the smell. The girl next to her, who eats the same food at home, goes red to the ears and says nothing at all. After that Winnie starts binning her mum's cooking and buying lettuce with her own pocket money.

There's no speech about it. That's exactly why it works.

The magic arrives through a school bake sale. Hunting for a recipe, Winnie digs out an old red cookbook with brown stains on the cover that belonged to Lao Lao, the grandmother who died before she was born. The only page she can prise open is mooncakes. One of the ingredients is listed as essence of the moon.

She bakes them. She eats one. The family rabbit eats several. And then the rabbit starts complaining there was too much filling, in her grandmother's voice.

Lao Lao turns out to be furious about being hauled out of the spirit realm halfway through a headlock, cheerfully rude about Winnie's manners, and now her guide to a whole ranking of spirits she's never heard of.

It's a very funny book with something tender underneath it. The grandmother Winnie only ever knew from a photograph above the piano is suddenly in the kitchen telling her off. And the cooking she's been quietly throwing away at school turns out to be where all of it came from.

What to read next

For another kid whose Chinese heritage turns up in their life without asking first, try Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor.