Introduction

Happy New Year friends, and welcome back! Today’s book is a NetGalley pick, and what a good one it was. The Unbeatable Lily Hong is Diana Ma’s middle grade debut after two prior YA novels. In it we follow Lily, a high achiever and aspiring filmmaker whose goal is to be the best she can possibly be. This is a very recent release – January 2nd! From the publisher:

… In addition to doing regular homework and attending the Chinese school her parents own and run out of the Clarktown Community Center, Lily’s been getting weird vibes from her parents lately and she can tell something is up. Then her mom announces that the Clarktown Community Center is having its first showcase, and the students of Hong Chinese Academy will be performing as a group—traditional Chinese dance!

Lily is more confused than anything else—the community center is practically falling apart and they think this is a good time to put on a show? Could it be that the community center is in trouble and the only way to save it is to make the showcase a huge success? Lily has no choice. She’ll have to juggle the video competition and the art of Chinese dance simultaneously. But when Max Zhang unexpectedly shows up in her class at Chinese school with his perfect Mandarin and his surprisingly good dance skills, Lily might just have to embrace her longtime rival as a key part of her plan to save the community center.

Publisher’s site

The summary I pulled from the HarperCollins page above is only a small part of a larger whole – there’s a lot of fun moving parts to this story! I’m hoping that it sells the book to you as well as it sold itself to me. This book is a joyful celebration of overcoming adversity and embracing intersectional parts of one’s identity. Let’s dive in below.

The Good Stuff

What first drew me to this book was the cover. The artwork is so joyful that I couldn’t resist reading it! Although it took me a while to finally get to reading it, I devoured the whole thing in just one day. As I mentioned above, this story follows titular character Lily Hong. She lives in Clarktown, a tiny town just outside of Seattle, Washington. Her parents run the Hong Chinese Academy out of the Clarktown Community Center. Lily’s life is pretty normal – she has best friends and is super-good at everything she tries, although she’s locked in a battle with her nemesis Max Zhang for the highest grades. Lily prepares to enter the Clarktown’s Got Talent video competition with her friends when her parents suddenly decide that the Hong Chinese Academy will be putting on a traditional Chinese dance showcase at the Clarktown Community Center. Lily now must balance filming an epic story with her best friends and learning how to dance with two left feet. It turns out that the community center’s survival may depend on how well she can balance the two!

Y’all… y’all. This book was SO CUTE. Everything is well-paced and set up story-wise so that readers understand what Lily’s motivations and conflicts are. The story is written from her point of view, which gives us deep insight into how the events of the story make her feel and why she acts/reacts the way she does. Lily has a lot of feelings and isn’t always the best at figuring them out – we see her grow and understand as she makes her way through the story. Her friends, family, and community members also play a role in her growth. This doesn’t mean that they’re two-dimensional support characters, however – even characters with only one or two brief appearances have a depth that Ma artfully shows. The dance teacher and one of Lily’s Aunties are two great examples. Ma shows us a relationship with a long history almost in between the lines, although Lily meddles a little bit to get them to see eye-to-eye again. Again, this story is enormously sweet. Ma does a wonderful job of telling Lily’s story from a Chinese American perspective in a way that readers can understand. I’m sure that readers from similar backgrounds will really enjoy this story! That said, Ma writes it in a way that is really for everyone.

There were a few fun Easter eggs too. I can’t let this review pass without mentioning the “Creative Anachronisms Society” mentioned in the community center showcase. As a former SCAdian myself, I recognized the reference immediately! I couldn’t help but laugh (in a mixture of joy and embarassment) at such an unexpected call-out.

In Summary

This book was a joy. I can’t wait to get it on our shelves so I can share it with our kids! The Unbeatable Lily Hong is highly recommended.

The Unbeatable Lily Hong is written by Diana Ma. It’s published by Clarion Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books. You can find a link to purchase it from the publisher here. As always, gichi miigwech for reading!