In 1927, 15-year-old Joan Lee moves with her family from Ohio to a small town in West Virginia. As the only Chinese-Americans in town, the Lees face social ostracism and overt racism from townspeople who boycott the Lee family business. Joan herself feels tensions between the pressure at home to follow strict Chinese traditions and the pressure at school to assimilate into a white American mainstream. The Chinese folktale of the star fisher, a bird/woman caught between two worlds, provides the central metaphor for this rich, witty, engrossing novel. (Ages 10-13)

Fifteen-year-old Joan Lee and her family find the adjustment hard when they move from Ohio to West Virginia in the 1920s.