Finding My Voice

The groundbreaking Own Voices YA classic from Korean-American author Marie Myung-Ok Lee, reissued with a new foreword from Wicked Fox author Kat Cho.

Seventeen-year-old Ellen Sung just wants to be like everyone else at her all-white school. But hers is the only Korean American family in town, and her classmates in Arkin, Minnesota, will never let her forget that she’s different. At the start of senior year, Ellen finds herself falling for Tomper Sandel, a football player who is popular and blond and undeniably cute . . . and to her surprise, he falls for her, too. Now Ellen has a chance at a life she never imagined, one that defies the expectations of both her core friend group and her strict parents. But even as she stands up to racism at school and disapproval at home, all while pursuing a romance with Tomper, Ellen discovers that her greatest challenge is one she never expected: finding the courage to speak up and raise her voice.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of two other YA novels: Necessary Roughness and Saying Goodbye, the sequel to Finding My Voice, as well as the middle grade novels If It Hadn’t Been for Yoon Jun and Night of the Chupacabras. Her books have won multiple awards, including Friends of American Writers, New York Public Library’s Best Books for the Teen Age, and NCTE’s Children’s Choice. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards, a Fulbright Fellow, and was one of the first Korean American journalists allowed into North Korea.