Jenny Han, known more for her young adult titles (Shug; The Summer I Turned Pretty), here demonstrates her versatility with a warm and often funny story about eight-year-old Clara Lee. The book begins in the weeks leading up to her hometown Apple Blossom Festival. Clara Lee wishes she could be Bramley's Little Miss Apple Pie and ride on a float in the festival's parade. As a second grader, she'd been too shy to give the required speech for the entire school. But now that she's in third grade, she's determined to try. She has the perfect outfit to wear if she wins: the dress her grandfather bought her in Korea last year that makes her feel like "a Korean princess from long ago."
One of the most touching aspects of the novel involves Clara Lee's close relationship to her Korean grandfather, who lives with them. As Grandpa asks Clara Lee to explain to him the details of her life and her dreams, the author lets younger readers in on some of the tale's more sophisticated ideas (such as the "chariot" that appears to Clara Lee in a dream). He is the heroine's confidant on good days and bad ones. When fellow third-grader and Miss Little Apple Pie hopeful Dionne Gregory brags to Clara Lee that her "great-great-great-uncle was one of Bramley's founding fathers," and that her family is "as American as apple pie," Grandpa comes up with the perfect reassurance for Clara Lee. "You are all-American Korean American!" he says. "One hundred percent American, one hundred percent Korean. Doesn't make you less than anybody else. It makes you more." In her anxiety about her run for Little Miss Apple Pie, she steps on a few toes and has to make up with her six-year-old sister, Emmeline, and her friends Shayna and Max. Han gets the voice just right, and gives readers a rare glimpse into a second-generation household--all in the context of a third-grader experiencing her first taste of independence. Readers will want to see much more of this winning heroine. Encore!--Jennifer M. Brown