Willa Chen has never quite fit in. Growing up as a biracial Chinese
American girl in New Jersey, Willa felt both hypervisible and unseen,
too Asian to fit in at her mostly white school, and too white to speak
to the few Asian kids around. After her parents' early divorce, they
both remarried and started new families, and Willa grew up feeling
outside of their new lives, too.
For years, Willa does her best to stifle her feelings of loneliness,
drifting through high school and then college as she tries to quiet the
unease inside her. But when she begins working for the Adriens--a
wealthy white family in Tribeca--as a nanny for their daughter, Bijou,
Willa is confronted with all of the things she never had. As she draws
closer to the family and eventually moves in with them, Willa finds
herself questioning who she is, and revisiting a childhood where she
never felt fully at home. Self-examining and fraught with the emotions
of a family who fails and loves in equal measure, Win Me Something is a
nuanced coming-of-age debut about the irreparable fissures between
people, and a young woman who asks what it really means to belong, and
how she might begin to define her own life.*
*
