K-Jane

Living in Omaha, Neb., attending a mostly white school, and having been named after Jane Eyre, 17-year-old third-generation Korean American Jane Choi feels out of tune with her heritage. To her chagrin, her Korean culture–obsessed classmates seem to know more about Jane’s heritage than she does: she doesn’t speak Korean, she’s not versed in the latest K-dramas or K-pop songs, and she hates kimchi. When she learns that her parents plan to name her baby brother Franklin, after the American founding father, she resolves to save him from experiencing the internal shame she holds from feeling ignorant about her Korean heritage. With help from her grandmother, Jane educates herself in all things Korean, including the food, language, music, and more, which she documents on a private social media account. But when a specific video somehow goes viral, Jane struggles to manage the emotional fallout of online infamy. Hilarious and heartening, this earnest novel by Kang (the Control duology) excavates one teen’s longing to connect—with her identity, her family, and the people around her who seem to find comfort in aspects of her culture that she wasn’t raised to celebrate. Quick pacing and lighthearted prose buoy weighty themes of parental pressure and the sometimes devastating influence of social media on one’s self-perception. Ages 13–up. Agent: Jordan Hill, New Leaf Literary. (Oct.)