18 August 2026 FOREIGNERS by E.L. Shen, HarperCollins/Quill Tree, September 2026, 448p., ISBN: 978-0-06-323800-8
“White ones and red ones
And some you can't disguise
Twisted truth and half the news
Can't hide it in your eyes
Lies lies lies yeah”
– Thompson Twins (1982)
“‘So, um, as you know, I’m supposed to interview someone for my history project and talk about a part of their life as it relates to, well, history.’ Dawn pauses. ‘I have to write a paper on it and then do a full-class presentation at the end of the year.’”
“Nine Motives for Telling Lies
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To avoid being punished.
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To obtain a reward not otherwise readily obtainable.
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To protect another person from being punished.
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To protect oneself from the threat of physical harm.
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To win the admiration of others.
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To get out of an awkward social situation.
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To avoid embarrassment.
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To maintain privacy without notifying others of that intention.
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To exercise power over others by controlling the information the target has.”
– Dr. Paul Ekman
“Once, she thinks, despite being frail and sick, he insisted on tucking her into her bed and reading her a picture book–a story about a mouse maybe, and a princess. Was that real? Or did she make it up, a nice memory so she could think of him fondly all these years later? Was he actually mean and horrible?
And what happened with her grandmother’s former boyfriend, Samuel? They seemed like they loved each other, especially given that letter. Why did they break up? And where did he disappear to? People don’t just go back to China, never to be seen again. There’s always a reason. The more Dawn learns, the more questions she has. She angrily paces back and forth between her bed and her desk.
‘Bullshit!’ she shouts to no one.
And she realizes it’s true. It is bullshit. All the lies, all the secrets, the masks her family wears, the one she puts on too, like a good show will erase the past. How can you call yourself a family when you don’t know the first thing about each other? How can you call yourself anything at all?”
FOREIGNERS is the punch-to-the-gut, can’t-put-it-down story of high school junior Dawn Chin and her grandmother, Zheng Yi (these days known as Audrey Zheng). Thanks to Dawn’s high school project, the pair will eventually dig down through all of that bullshit, and all of those lies, in order to belatedly get to really know each other AND to share each other’s deepest, darkest, closely-held secrets and pasts.
“‘Um, right, so,’ Dawn begins, ‘the first question is: What history time period feels the most meaningful to you? Dad said that you immigrated here in 1965. Was that, uh, a meaningful year for you?’
Nai Nai shrugs. ‘It was a big year for America and the world. But for me, I didn’t really experience that.’
‘So you weren’t a secret hippie or whatever?’ Dawn jokes.
Dawn’s grandmother blinks in the afternoon sun. ‘No.’
The water boils and she pours it into her and Dawn’s cups before taking a seat, her chair directly across from her granddaughter’s as if they are two players reluctantly playing a game of verbal chess.”
FOREIGNERS is a big, fat, compelling teen read with a serious overdose of jaw-dropping secrets. I experienced a bumper crop of mental “wows” and “whoas" as the surprising story bounced back and forth between teenage Audrey in the late Sixties, and the grandmother-granddaughter mind games sixty years later.
As a teen who, back in 1965, was then the age Dawn is today, Zheng Yi won a scholarship to a private prep high school in New York City, and left Taiwan on a student visa to spend her senior year in the U.S. The goal is to work hard at school so as to gain acceptance to college in the land of opportunity.
In 1965 New York, Yi lives with her parents’ friends, who had immigrated there earlier. She is required to nanny the friends’ three boys after school while struggling to improve her English, complete her classes, and traverse the complicated maze of social ins and outs she faces while dealing with a collection of mostly white private school kids. All this, while simultaneously working to reinvent herself and get into college. Nowadays, she is a past-retirement-age librarian in New Hampshire.
As a contemporary teen, Dawn is attending a boarding school in Vermont, three thousand miles away from her parents and home in California, but just a state away from her grandmother. The initial challenge is that, despite her grandmother’s past annual visits and extended-family vacations, Dawn has never really communed with or learned anything about her grandmother. At the story’s outset, the pair are very much strangers. It only gets more complicated when the web of lies and omissions begin.
Given all the powerful surprises, I’ll leave it there. I strongly encourage adding this to both middle- and high school collections.
Richie Partington, MLIS
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