Willa Chen has never quite fit in. Growing up as a biracial Chinese American girl in New Jersey, Willa feels 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, Willa's mother and father both remarry and start new families, and Willa grows up feeling that she is 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 the things she never had. As she draws closer to the family, eventually moving in with them, Willa finds herself questioning who she is and revisiting a childhood where she never felt fully at home.
A deeply insightful portrait of a family who love and fail in equal measure, Win Me Something is a nuanced coming-of-age debut novel about the irreparable fissures between people and about a young woman who asks what it means to belong and how she might begin to define her own life.
The New School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.