Eureka
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 27, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
For fans of Inside Out and Back Again, Other Words for Home, and A Place to Hang the Moon -- Eureka is a gorgeous and emotionally resonant novel-in-verse by multiple-award-winning poet Victoria Chang that sensitively and lyrically renders the tragic events surrounding the 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California.
Love illuminates the dark.
The year is 1885. San Francisco is dangerous for Chinese immigrants like twelve-year-old Mei Mei. She must venture on her own, without her family or friends, to Eureka, California, where it is supposedly safe.
But 300 miles from home, Mei Mei misses her Ma Ma’s kindness, helping out in her Ba Ba’s store, and playing hide-and-seek with her best friend, Hua Hua. Despite her fear and the increasing violence against her community, she finds hope in an unexpected friend, the giant Redwood trees, and a new dream: learning how to read in English. As the world around her grows more scary, Mei Mei discovers her own power, as well as the joy of found family, the importance of courage, and the nature of freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chang (With My Back to the World, for adults) vividly renders discrimination and racism experienced by those of Chinese heritage in 1880s California through the eyes of a 12-year-old Chinese immigrant in this dynamic verse novel. In 1884 San Francisco, Mei Mei is not permitted by law to attend public school with American children. Instead, she's educated by white teachers in the basement of a church, and learns reading and writing in her native Cantonese at a Chinese school. Using her big strong feet—so unlike Ma Ma's bound ones, "each broken toe like a lotus flower petal"—Mei Mei explores her neighborhood. But her independence is soon curtailed when, worried about increasing violence toward Chinese people, her parents send her to live with relatives up north in Eureka, believing it to be safer than San Francisco. But in Eureka, Mei Mei's aunt arranges for the tween to work as a kitchen aide for a rich white family. During her employ, she's taunted by the family's racist son, Lester, and secretly befriends their daughter Sara, who furthers Mei Mei's English education. First-person verse depicts the conditions of the period, viscerally establishing the wrenching baseline of bias and cruelty that saw Chinese residents living in wooden shacks while white families resided in multistory row houses with big windows. A contextualizing author's note details the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Ages 10–14.
