An Na,
Wait for Me
Putnam Juvenile, 2006.

Ages 10-14

Mina is a train wreck waiting to happen. Under intense pressure to succeed from her fierce, determined mother, the young Korean-American girl is finishing up her junior year in a small-town California high school with an increasing burden of deceit. She’s been filching from the till of her family’s laundry business, saving up to escape, though she knows not to what. And abetted by an older Stanford-bound boy, whose more prosperous family her mother is obsequious to, she’s been forging her report cards and considering having someone else take her SATs. This girl is never going to Harvard, as her mother expects...

Moreover, Mina is the primary emotional support for her younger, hearing-impaired sister, Suna, whom their mother has callously written off as damaged goods. Prize-winning young adult novelist An Na’s latest book sets up as an almost Shakespearean tragedy.

Then Ysrael enters the picture: a Hispanic boy hired to help out for minimal pay when the girls’ father injures his back. The girls are forbidden to speak to him, but it turns out he’s the heart energy of the story - a musician who’s getting out of town, going to San Francisco to music school. It’s his influence and inspiration that eventually provide Mina with the strength of character to turn her life around and uncover the secret in her mother’s past.

While stereotypes abound in this romantic novel, they are also broken. Mina’s mother is a dragon with no redeeming qualities and Ysrael is an idealized dreamboat of a rescuer. But there is no easy way out of Mina’s situation, and as she discovers her true priorities, the novel offers teens a chance to reflect on important themes: character flaws and how to correct them; the necessity to see things through; the art of balancing the conflicting demands of following one’s own path and waiting for the proper time to act.

The novel is probably too formulaic for older girls, but for younger teens the relations between Mina, Suna, and Ysrael will prove absorbing, instructive, and pleasurable to sigh over.

Charlotte Richardson
July 2007