Millicent Min is a precocious 11-year-old Chinese-American girl who is heading into her senior year in high school and taking her first college course over the summer. To her dismay, she is also roped into tutoring Stanford Wong, whom she considers a dumb jock. Happily, she finds her first real same-age friend in Emily Ebers, who just moved to town, but she's afraid that her being a genius might ruin the relationship. Her story is cleverly told through a series of journal entries.
Stanford Wong, also Chinese-American, is the star basketball player on his school's A-Team, but he failed 6th grade English. In order to advance into 7th grade - and stay on the A-Team - he needs to go to summer school, and Millicent Min is hired to tutor him. Stanford is a pretty complex character: he struggles with living up to his tiger dad's high academic expectations, he values his friendships but is embarrassed to tell them about summer school; he has a real soft spot for his aging grandmother who is slowly losing her mental faculties; and to top it all off, he has his first real crush on Emily Ebers. Not being the type to keep a journal, his story is told in the present tense, with both date and time stamps, giving the impression that we're reading his internal monologue narration of his life.
Emily Ebers is blond, bubbly, a little on the heavy side, confident in herself, but not in the world around her. She and her mom just moved to Rancho Rosetta, CA from New Jersey following a heart-breaking divorce. Emily struggles with accepting her parents' divorce; she yearns for attention from her far-away father while icing out her mother and blaming her mother for the divorce. She keeps a letter journal, addressing each entry to her father and planning to send the entire journal to her father at the end of the summer.
I loved so much about each of the books, but what really impressed me was Lisa Yee's ability to get into the mind of whichever main character was narrating the story. I've read books in which each chapter is written from the perspective of a certain character, but in many cases, the only way you would know who the narrator is is by the name in the chapter title. In this series, each character has such a clear personality and distinctive voice that comes through in the writing, and you can imagine real middle schoolers finding so many authentic connections throughout the books.
- Millicent Min, Girl Genius (#1) ★★★★
- Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time (#2) ★★★★½
- So Totally Emily Ebbers (#3) ★★★★★
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