By Belana Beeck
Emiko Jean, author of Tokyo Ever After and Tokyo Dreaming, has written an exciting new story that cradles you, guides you, and instructs you the way a mother does for her child.
We meet thirty-five year-old Mika with her life in shambles. She can’t land a job, her relationship with her parents is nothing but messy, and things with her last boyfriend have ended poorly. But then, as she’s walking around Target, looking at all the items she would buy if she had the money, she gets a call from her daughter, Penelope—Penny for short. The daughter she gave up for adoption sixteen years ago; the daughter she thought she’d never hear from again. With Penny determined to have a relationship with her birth mother and Mika wanting to be someone Penny is proud of, Mika begins embellishing aspects of her life. The illusion slowly snowballs into a lie Mika can’t keep up with. Not to mention the rocky relationship she has with Penny’s adoptive father, Thomas Calvin, which slowly turns into a friendship and maybe something more. Can Mika have it all, or will it all come crashing down on her?
This is a perfect summer read that will leave you wishing you could stay in Mika’s world forever. The characters’ lives were all so compelling such as Mika’s complicated relationship with her parents and Penny juggling her emotions towards her new biological mother and adoptive mother who passed away. Jean does a great job in incorporating all kinds of emotions in her work. The sadness of loss in this novel takes your breath away but the sprinkle of humor and hope keeps you wanting more.
This contemporary novel is rich with Japanese heritage as we see Mika and her parents struggle over being immigrants to the United States. We also see Penny’s love and excitement over discovering her Japanese side, having grown up with American adoptive parents. In the story, Penny states that she wishes she would have been given a Japanese name. Mika, having been the one to name her daughter, realizes that she had chosen Penelope to make it easier for her daughter as Mika had grown up with numerous people mispronouncing her name. This dynamic shows how different experiences shape your thoughts, desires and actions. For me, these cultural details made the story relatable to anyone who had experienced immigration whether that be themselves, parents, or their ancestors. I myself have experienced this with my parents who immigrated from their native countries, Argentina and Peru. It was nice to see these immigrant experiences in the story and ultimately made my reading experience more memorable and important.
This book is such a great reading experience that I wish I could experience this book for the first time all over again. It is filled with amazing characters that I want to know more about like why X character does Y or behaves Z. And the fact that we have a thirty-five year old protagonist serves as a great opportunity to diversify the age range of characters in young adult literature.
Mika in Real Life is available at Alexander Book Company, Barnes & Noble, Blue Cypress Books, Eso Won Books, The Last Bookstore, and Powell’s City of Books. You can also learn more about it through Reese Witherspoon’s YA Book Club.
Belana Beeck is a prose and poetry writer, interested in fantasy, historical, and contemporary fiction. She is also eager to showcase her Latinx culture through her work. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University.