Things get a bit better when Mia befriends a girl named Lupe, who understands what she’s going through.

Mia loves writing and English, although her mom wants her to focus on math, thinking that, as an immigrant, Mia won’t ever become good at English.

Mia has to deal with school, where the kids tease her for being poor and Chinese. They also secretly hide other Chinese immigrants who are struggling, letting them stay the night in their motel. Mia and her family struggle with poverty and their mean boss, Mr. Kelly Yang wrote the novel based on her real childhood experiences. from China with her parents, and now helps them run a motel in California. Īn update from book club! Today we discussed Kelly Yang’s award-winning novel Front Desk, which follows Mia Tang, a ten-year-old girl who immigrates to the U.S. We started out our discussion by talking about what superpowers we would have if we could choose answers including turning into.

Everybody who came really enjoyed the book. Over the course of the story, Ulysses’ loving friendship makes Flora more hopeful and helps her re-connect with her mom and dad. Meescham, to rescue Ulysses, so that he can continue helping them. Buckman, her poetry-loving next door neighbor, Tootie, Tootie’s temporarily-blind great-nephew William Spiver, and Mr. But things change when she sees, in the neighbor’s backyard, a squirrel getting accidentally sucked up in a vacuum cleaner! Flora rushes over to do some squirrel-CPR, and when the squirrel (whom they name Ulysses) wakes up, it turns out he now has superpowers, including super-strength, flight, and the ability to write poetry! Unfortunately, Flora’s mom is not okay with having a squirrel living in the house, and wants to get rid of Ulysses, so Flora has to team up with her gentle father, Mr. When the novel starts out, Flora Belle Buckman describes herself as a ‘cynic,’ meaning someone who is pessimistic and reluctant to hope, probably because her parents have recently divorced and she doesn’t get along very well with her mother. An update from book club! Today in Stone Soup Book Club, we discussed Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo, a wonderful, whimsical novel about a girl who befriends a squirrel with superpowers! The story is mostly written in prose, and interspersed with illustrated comic sections and poems.

The list patricia forde summary