Wen is an 11-year-old living in an orphanage in China. She's been adopted and her American family is there to pick her up. She says goodbye to her best friend, Shu Ling, who helped her get acclimated to the orphanage when Wen arrived. Wen promises to help Shu Ling find a family in the US.
Wen struggles with adjusting to life in the US. She knows quite a bit of English, but she fears getting close to her adoptive mother, because she remembers her biological mother leaving her at the orphanage when she was five. The family chose to keep the newborn boy and abandon poor Wen, then five years old. She's also seen an orphan returned when she behaved badly with the people that were going to adopt her. So Wen has a constant fear of abandonment. Wen also is uncomfortable with anyone that she feels compromises her relationship with Shu Ling. She won't call her younger sister Emily, adopted from China as a baby and now seven years old, "mei mei," because she considers herself "mei mei" to Shu Ling. She's afraid to form the sister bond with anyone else, and she also distances herself from her best American friend, because she's afraid that will be unfair to Shu Ling, her actual best friend.
While Wen deals with all these feelings, she works toward getting Shu Ling adopted. What she didn't know (and neither did Shu Ling) was that Shu Ling is actually 13, not 12. She's only a few weeks away from her 14th birthday, at which point she'll "age out" of the adoption system by China's laws. Wen has mere weeks to get her best friend a home in America before she faces never seeing her again. So can Wen get Shu Ling adopted and adjust to life with her own new family? Read the book and find out.
Seriously, this is really good. Read it.
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