Kyle Lucia Wu's first novel, Win Me Something, is a wrenching evocation of yearning in a slim, artful package. The story of Willa Chen, a young woman unmoored in New York City, is defined by liminal spaces and a wish to belong.
In the opening pages, Willa interviews to become a nanny to a wealthy family in Tribeca, even though she can't quite conceive of what a nanny does. "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."
Willa's father is a Chinese American immigrant whom she barely knows, her mother a blonde-haired white woman, detached and depressed, who can't comprehend the microaggressions her daughter faces. Since their divorce when Willa was very young, each has begun a new family, and she feels she belongs to neither. Thus adrift, she enters the Adriens' household, where she cares for the charming, innocently privileged, nine-year-old Bijou, who studies Mandarin and the violin and cooks coq au vin. Willa feels as unbelonging as ever, but also entranced by the family's ease, their wealth, their things. "When I looked around their apartment, my veins filled with rushes of want, as if I could see the price tags on everything, as if they would increase my own value." It's not that Willa is materialistic, but that she is drawn to the idea of worth suggested by those around her: "I often found myself in friendships with people like this, self-absorbed and sparkling."
Readers will be engrossed by Willa's troubled desire to please and her pervasive unease, as she seeks and then deflects the slightest attempt at connection. As she begins to meld into the Adriens' household, she reconsiders her own childhood and family homes in a series of flashbacks. The subtle racism she encounters is but one thread of Willa's distress; her estrangement from both of her half-families, and her half-hearted attempts to join the Adriens', presents a greater challenge on its face, but also stands in for the larger estrangement she feels everywhere she goes, as the in-between spaces of family and race in culture echo each other.
With an eye for just the right detail, Wu offers an understated protagonist, self-defeating but still searching. Win Me Something is a nuanced story of longing, of the paired desires to belong and to strike one's own path. Willa is a quiet heroine, but unforgettable. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: A young woman must chart her own way, even while quietly craving belonging and home, in this subtle, wise debut.