WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Middle School

Mia Tang is at the top of her game!
She’s spending winter break with Mom, Lupe, Jason, and Hank in San Francisco’s Chinatown! Rich with history and hilarious aunties and uncles, it’s the place to find a great story—one she hopes to publish while attending journalism camp at the Tribune. But this trip has as many bumps as the hills of San Francisco.
1. Mia’s camp is full of older kids with famous relatives, fancy laptops, and major connections! Can she compete with just her pen and passion?
2. Lupe’s thinking about skipping ahead to college! Will Mia ever get a chance to just chill with her best friend?
3. Jason’s crushing hard on a new girl. For the first time ever, Mia is speechless and jealous. Can she find the courage to tell Jason that she has a crush on him?
Even for the best writers, it’s not always easy to find the right words. But if anyone can tell a top story, it’s Mia Tang!

Like the last four Mia Tang books, so much is happening. The storyline I was most invested in was the journalism camp at the Tribune, where Mia faces many injustices.

Mia and five other kids won a scholarship to attend the camp, and it seemed clear from the start that the whole scholarship was a publicity stunt by the Tribune to make the newspaper seem more diverse. The big-shot editors in charge of the camp clearly favor the wealthy, well-connected kids over the scholarship kids. Mia teams up with two other scholarship winners, and the biased editors dismiss all of their story pitches. I wish more had been said about the other three scholarship winners. I imagine they got the same unfair treatment Mia and her friends did. One of them was in a wheelchair, and I can only imagine the hardships she went through.

It is astounding how Kelly Yang incorporated so much history about Chinatown, The Chinese Exclusion Act, and other terrible laws passed against Chinese Americans, as well as history about the Japanese and Indigenous people, into this book. And in classic Kelly Yang fashion, none of it is sugar-coated.

I was not a fan of the drama between Mia and Jason. It was too cringy for my liking, and I don’t think this path was necessary. They were better off as close friends, in my opinion. However, I am happy that Jason has matured greatly since the first book.

Sidenote: It’s mentioned that boba is from Taiwan. This has nothing to do with anything. I just thought it was interesting.