Name: Win Me Something
Rating: 4 (6 reviews)
ISBN: 9781951142735

Kyle Lucia Wu

Perceptive and timely debut of identity and belonging--of a young woman determined to be seen.

Win Me Something

Kristen Claiborn

There is so much to unwrap in this book! Willa is a fascinating character, grappling with her relationships with both parents while trying to figure out how to care for somebody else’s child. She holds resentments towards both parents, both having created new families after they split with each other. She felt like she was semi-forgotten by her father, which is something I with which I was able to identify. I resented my dad for years after he remarried and had two more children. I didn’t feel like I received even half of the love and benefits of having him as a father. I have since realized that was primarily all in my head, but at the time it felt very real, and it I felt very unimportant. I spent the majority of my time with my mom, who I resented for everything that was wrong in my life (and I carried that for years as well). Willa’s character felt like it was written with the emotions of somebody that had felt similarly as they moved into full-blown adulthood. 
	I also did a stint as a nanny back when I was in college. I was never a live-in, but I did become very close to those kids. It’s an interesting relationship between a nanny and her wards. I loved those kids. I saw their successes as mine while I was with them, and I also felt their pain almost like I was their parent. Then, somehow, I had to put away the “parent” hat when their parents came home, and I had to figure out how to fill that hole until I was back on the job. When the family sat me down to let me know they were not going to need a nanny anymore, I was devastated. While I knew it was a job, and jobs do end, I was more emotionally tangled in this family than I would have been with other jobs, so I was lost for a while. 
	I feel like I connected with this book more than others might simply because Willa’s life so closely resembled my own (except for that whole live in New York City part, though in my mid-twenties I would have loved to). I have often said that one person’s response to a book is going to differ from others based entirely on how they connect to the characters and storyline, which is why I enjoyed this one so much. I look forward to future work by Wu!

A Washington Post, LitHub, The Millions, and Books Are Magic Most Anticipated Book of 2021 and a Good Housekeeping, Shondaland, and Alma Best Book of Fall A perceptive and powerful debut of identity and belonging—of a young woman determined to be seen. 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.

Julia

Amelia

I like Willa as a character & I enjoyed how the author explored the superficiality of NYC in your early-mid twenties … but I wanted to depth if thus book to go into the present and future, not simply look to the past. 

Christina Pappas

I LOVED this book. Couldn't put it down, couldn't stop dog-earing, couldn't stop texting friends with snapshots of paragraphs and !!!!s kind of love.

Win Me Something follows Willa Chen - half Chinese, half white - through a formative year-ish of nannying for a wealthy white family in Manhattan and reckoning with her own muddled childhood. In the author's words, from the very first page:

"I had parents. I had siblings. I had homes, multiple or zero, depending on how you looked at it. I wasn't unloved, not uncared for, exactly. It was cloudier than that, ink spreading into water as I tried to claim the words. If you're undercared for, but essentially fine, what do you do with all that hurt, the kind that runs through your tendons and tugs on your muscles but doesn't show up on your skin?" 

WHEW.

Throughout the (debut!) novel, Willa grapples with this pervasive feeling of not belonging, of feeling tolerated but never actively wanted, of squeezing herself in to the margins of other people's lives. (The way Lucia Wu writes this is fresh and resonant and haunting; the prose is stellar.) I was so compelled by her journey as she starts to name and explore and question these beliefs. 

Strongly, strongly recommend.

Win Me Something

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