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Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu

Literary fiction

Win Me Something

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Kyle Lucia Wu, on your first book!

by Kyle Lucia Wu

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Quick take

A young biracial woman grapples with identity and belonging while nannying for a wealthy family in New York City.

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  • Illustrated icon, Nonlinear_Timeline

    Nonlinear timeline

  • Illustrated icon, Critically_Acclaimed

    Critically acclaimed

  • Illustrated icon, Mama_Drama

    Mama drama

  • Illustrated icon, NYC

    NYC

Synopsis

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.

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Get an early look from the first pages of Win Me Something.

Win Me Something

1

New York City, 2013

I didn’t know what it looked like to take care of someone. I imagined that being a nanny meant watching a small person bounce her backpack home from school, microwaving chicken nuggets on a paper-toweled plate, and lying with an arm folded behind my head while the bright colors of a cartoon flashed. The intricacies of it hadn’t occurred to me—that I’d have to sniff her palms to discern the citrus scent of soap and scrape dirt from underneath her fingernails. How I’d end up eating a room-temperature scoop of macaroni and cheese off her plate and raking lice shampoo through her soapy scalp. Maybe I couldn’t imagine these moments because when someone asked about my childhood, my mind clenched and closed like two fists in a pool—fingers squeezing for something to come up with when everything around them was a different kind of matter.

I had parents. I had siblings. I had homes, multiple or zero, depending on how you looked at it. I wasn’t un-loved, not uncared for, exactly. It was cloudier than that,ink spreading in 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? There were harder things in the world, hundreds of them. I floated silently through.

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Why I love it

From the very first page of Kyle Lucia Wu’s Win Me Something, I felt an aching tenderness for the main character. Meet Willa Chen—a biracial Chinese American girl who feels adrift, as if the world doesn’t quite have a place for someone like her. “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 in water as I tried to claim the words,” she says. All of us have felt this way at some point in our lives, right? As if we don’t belong, not really.

Win Me Something begins in 2013, when 24-year-old Willa finds a job as a nanny for a white, wealthy family in New York City. As she takes care of the precious Bijou, who is coddled with dance lessons and cooking classes and constant attention, Willa can’t help but think of her own fragmented childhood. With parents who remarried and had children with their new partners, Willa flitted between her mother and father’s home, constantly an outsider. How lonely she was, longing to be seen. Now, as a nanny, she wonders how much has changed. As Willa becomes closer with the family she works for, she thinks that maybe, just maybe, she’s finally found a new home. But do they feel the same way? This is a beautiful, devastating coming-of-age story. I hope you love it—and Willa—as much as I did.

Member ratings (1,075)

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Literary fiction
View all
Intermezzo
The Book of George
Real Americans
Dirty Diana
Wellness
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The God of the Woods
Same As It Ever Was
Annie Bot
Bear
Mercury
True Biz
Family Happiness
The Lady Waiting
The Other Valley
Hard by a Great Forest
Good Material
The Bullet Swallower
Happy All the Time
Rental House
Alice Sadie Celine
Let Us Descend
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Shark Heart
Homeseeking
Transcendent Kingdom
Hello Beautiful
Dominicana
What's Mine and Yours
The Unsettled
Ask Again, Yes
Vladimir
Infinite Country
The Prophets
Normal People
The Verifiers
Salvage the Bones
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
I Have Some Questions for You
Black Buck
The History of Love
Age of Vice
Paper Names
The Light Pirate
The Secret History
The Kite Runner
Memorial
The Half Moon
Happiness Falls
The Gifted School
The Death of Vivek Oji
The Knockout Queen
Little Monsters
Yerba Buena
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Free Food for Millionaires
A Burning
The Mothers
The Water Dancer
Small Country
The Sympathizer
Fleishman Is in Trouble
Lot
An American Marriage
The Animators
The Mars Room
Exit West
White Fur
Woman No. 17
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Eat Only When You're Hungry
Rainbirds
A Ladder to the Sky
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The Goldfinch
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& Sons
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Signal Fires
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Blue Sisters