Win Me Something: A Novel
Kyle Lucia WuA Most Anticipated Book of 2021 at LitHub & The Millions
A perceptive & powerful debut of identity & 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 & unseen, too Asian to fit in at her mostly white school, & too white to speak to the few Asian kids around. After her parents' early divorce, they both remarried & started new families, & 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 & 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 & eventually moves in with them, Willa finds herself questioning who she is, & revisiting a childhood where she never felt fully at home.
Self-examining & fraught with the emotions of a family who fails & loves in equal measure, Win Me Something is a nuanced coming-of-age debut about the irreparable fissures between people, & a young woman who asks what it really means to belong, & how she might begin to define her own life.
Kyle Lucia Wu has received the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellowship & residencies from The Millay Colony, The Byrdcliffe Colony, Plympton’s Writing Downtown Residency, & the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She is the Programs & Communications Director at Kundiman & has taught creative writing at Fordham University & The New School. She was born in New Jersey & lives in Los Angeles.