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Winnie Zeng Unleashes a Legend Paperback – April 25, 2023
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Winnie Zeng has two goals: survive her first year of middle school and outdo her stuck-up archnemesis, David Zuo. It won’t be easy, since, according to her older sister, middle school is the pits. Luckily, Winnie studied middle school survival tactics in comic books and anime, and nothing will stop her from being the very best student.
But none of Winnie’s research has prepared her to face the mother of all hurdles: evil spirits. When she makes mooncakes for a class bake sale, she awakens the stuff of legends from her grandmother’s old cookbook, spilling otherworldly chaos into her sleepy town.
Suddenly Winnie finds herself in a race against time, vanquishing demons instead of group projects. Armed with a magic cookbook and a talking white rabbit, she must embrace her new powers and legacy of her ancestors. Because if she doesn’t, her town—and rest of the world—may fall to chaos forever.
- Reading age8 - 12 years
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Grade level3 - 7
- Lexile measure780L
- Dimensions7.63 x 0.69 x 5.13 inches
- PublisherRandom House Books for Young Readers
- Publication dateApril 25, 2023
- ISBN-100593426606
- ISBN-13978-0593426609
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Funny, fast-paced, and deliciously fun. Readers beware: this book will make you hungry for more words—and definitely some mooncakes!” —Graci Kim, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Fallen Star
“A hilarious adventure, and a heartfelt journey about learning to love who you are.” —Remy Lai, author-illustrator of Pie in the Sky
"Katie Zhao whips up a delightful contemporary fantasy about appreciating your culture and standing up for yourself . . . young readers will gobble up this hilarious and charming story!” —E.L. Shen, author of The Comeback
"Realistic and relatable. A fun, fast-paced fantasy with heart.” —Booklist
"Readers will likely eagerly anticipate the next outing to see how Winnie, sardonic and brave, continues to evolve into the hero the world needs." —The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Middle school. Is there a scarier place on the planet? In books and movies, everything bad happens in middle school. Kids get bullied. Kids go through puberty. Teachers might turn into monsters or, worse, give out real homework.
Middle school has been ruining young lives for so long, there’s an ancient Chinese proverb that goes, “Middle school is the worst three years of a person’s life.” Okay, I may have made that one up, but if you ask me, it should be a proverb. Maybe middle school wasn’t so bad in ancient China.
Anyway, I planned to be as well equipped as possible to face down the beast known as middle school. I tried to buy a sword on eBay, but my parents stopped me and yelled about “buying dangerous weapons online,” even after I explained that the only danger was in me attending middle school without proper equipment. That didn’t go over very well, either.
As a result, I was forced to be resourceful. All summer before starting sixth grade at Groton Middle School, I studied movies, comic books, and anime to learn how to survive the upcoming school year. I practiced my roundhouse kicks in case an eighth-grade bully tried to shove me into a locker (something that was likely to happen daily, according to movies). Another common middle school occurrence, based on my reading of comic books and anime: kids discovering their hidden magic or superpowers and saving the world from evil adults. So I bought a pink cape and sparkly pink tights and memorized the Sailor Moon theme song. The chances were pretty slim, but just in case the Sailor Scouts came knocking on my door, asking me to join them in fighting evil by moonlight, I had to be prepared.
Then there was my real-life research on middle school, which came from my fourteen-year-old sister, Lisa. She’d just graduated from Groton Middle School and moved on to the only place more frightening than middle school: high school. Observing Lisa for the past three years had taught me exactly what not to do.
Still, all of my middle school readiness wasn’t enough to prepare me for the scream that woke me up on the first day of school:
“WINNIE, GET OUT OF BED AND HELP ME MAKE BREAKFAST!”
My mother’s shouting jerked me out of sleep. Groaning and rubbing my eyes, I rolled over to check my clock. It was only seven in the morning. Every other eleven-year-old on the planet was still fast asleep. Thanks to the nightmare I had last night, I’d barely slept a wink.
It was the same nightmare I’d had for almost two weeks straight, ever since I lost first prize in the statewide piano competition by only half a point. In my nightmare, the judge, who bore a suspicious resemblance to my mother, handed me the first-place trophy. But as soon as I reached out a hand to grab it, the Mama-judge snatched it back and announced that she’d made an error, and first place actually went to a giant marshmallow. For coming in second, I received . . . a truckload of SAT prep books.
“What the heck? Why am I being punished?” I cried out.
“This is for your own good, Winnie.” The Mama-judge opened the truck’s back door, revealing towering piles of workbooks. I tried to run but found that my feet were frozen. A huge, wobbling stack of books fell out of the truck and landed right on top of—
“ARGHHH NOOOOOO!”
I’d woken up from the nightmare drenched in sweat at three a.m. Even though I was exhausted, it took me a whole hour to fall back asleep. I hadn’t exactly been eager to see the conclusion of that nightmare.
In reality, I had lost the first-place trophy not to a giant marshmallow but to David Zuo, a.k.a. the single most annoying eleven-year-old in the whole country. Actually, make that the whole Western Hemisphere.
David attended my Sunday Chinese school, and we had the same piano teacher. As far back as I could remember, Mama was constantly comparing me with him. (Did you see that David won another Chinese language contest? Did you hear that David got a perfect score on his piano test?) And in my parents’ eyes, David Zuo could do no wrong. Though, of course, they didn’t know him like I did. They didn’t know that sometimes he went out of his way to show me that he’d gotten a higher score on a Chinese test, the jerk. They didn’t know that if you looked up obnoxious in the dictionary, you’d find his picture. It was up to me to prove to my parents that I could be just as good as—no, better than—David at anything and everything.
This was the second time in a row that I’d lost the piano competition to that turd David. It wasn’t exactly a successful start to the new school year, but at least I had the whole rest of the year to work on it.
“Stop thinking about David,” I ordered myself. Even though David had ruined part of my summer, at least there was no chance of him ruining middle school for me, too. He went to some smarty-pants private school in the next town over. I still reigned at the top of my grade, and I planned to keep it that way all throughout middle school.
“WINNIE! DON’T MAKE ME COME UP THERE!” Mama threatened.
“Coming!” I’d promised my mother yesterday that we’d wake up early and make breakfast together. And if there was one thing that could get me to leave my bed, it was the promise of food.
I grabbed the first-day-of-school outfit that I’d left hanging on my desk chair: a white sundress Mama had bought on sale at T.J. Maxx. Bounding down the stairs, I quickly combed through the tangles of my long black hair with a brush, which Mama had also picked up from the clearance rack at T.J. Maxx. (There was nothing my mother loved more than finding a good bargain at that store.) Then I styled it into my signature hairstyle, two long braided pigtails.
“What’re we making?” I asked as I walked into the kitchen.
Mama wrapped her flower-printed apron around her waist and then handed me mine, which had a panda design. “Your favorite. Scallion pancakes.”
At the thought of the savory dish, my mouth watered. Mama had already gotten out all the ingredients, so my job was to stir them together in a big mixing bowl.
By the time I’d finished and Mama had heated the pan, my older sister, Lisa, poked her head into the kitchen with a sleepy-looking expression. “Morning.” She made a beeline for the box of Frosted Flakes on top of the refrigerator, which was pretty much all she ever ate for breakfast.
“Put that cereal away,” Mama ordered, pointing at Lisa with her spatula. “We’re having scallion pancakes for breakfast.”
“But we have Chinese food, like, every meal of every day,” Lisa whined.
“Well, we are Chinese people,” Mama pointed out.
“That doesn’t mean we can’t eat other food.”
I tried my best to tune them out. Mama and Lisa had this argument almost daily. Ever since Lisa had started hanging out with the “popular” crowd back in middle school, she thought that Chinese food was uncool. Popular in middle school meant taking pride in mediocre grades and having parents who spoiled the heck out of you. Oh, and not eating good food, apparently.
“—and don’t even bother trying to appeal to your father to let you eat that cereal junk,” Mama was saying to Lisa. “He’s already gone to the office for the day.”
Baba was always at the office. If he could, he would probably sleep there. He worked as a lawyer, which meant he got to yell at people for a living and came home at really odd hours. One time I woke up at midnight because of a loud banging noise in the kitchen. I thought our house was being robbed, so I grabbed my tennis racket and ran downstairs. Before I could show off my sweet serve by aiming the ball at the “criminal,” like I’d learned from the manga The Prince of Tennis, the “criminal” had flipped on the light and started yelling at me. Turned out Baba had been heating up leftovers for a late dinner, and he didn’t appreciate nearly being beaned on the heinie with a tennis ball.
Mama was a business school professor at the local university, and sometimes she didn’t go to campus until after lunch. So she did the parenting for both her and Baba, which meant she basically yelled for a living, too.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House Books for Young Readers; Reprint edition (April 25, 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0593426606
- ISBN-13 : 978-0593426609
- Reading age : 8 - 12 years
- Lexile measure : 780L
- Grade level : 3 - 7
- Item Weight : 7.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.63 x 0.69 x 5.13 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #86,366 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #109 in Children's Asian & Asian American Books
- #2,340 in Children's Fantasy & Magic Books
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Katie Zhao is the author of many Asian American middle grade and young adult fiction titles. She grew up in Michigan, where there was little for her to do besides bury her nose in a good book or a writing journal. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in English and a minor in political science; she also completed her master's in accounting there. In her spare time, Katie enjoys reading, singing, dancing (badly), and checking out Instagram-worthy restaurants.
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5/5 STARS
Genre: Middle Grade Fantasy
This is book 1 in a series. Winnie makes mooncakes from her grandmother’s old recipe book and awakens the stuff of legends. She can now see evil spirits and it’s her job to save the town.
This is the type of fast paced middle grade fantasy books I like! It balances navigating middle school drama with a fantasy element. There is class competition and family drama all based on Chinese culture. It has a young female heroine with the weight of the town on her shoulders. I listened to this on audio and the narration was great! It is a quick read and I will be reading the sequel!
Thank you Penguin Random House Audio for the gifted copy!
She really loved it but, heavy topic for her age.
She also wanted to know tons more about dragons etc.
This fast-paced middle grade story explores many of the complicated feelings and events inherent to middle school amidst the excitement of supernatural powers and Chinese legends. As part of a Chinese-American family, Winnie straddles two cultures throughout this story. Attending both American and Chinese school is only one piece of the equation, though; she must also balance American and Chinese cuisine alongside western and eastern folkloric traditions. Additionally, she feels suffocated by the high expectations placed upon her by her family, especially as she is often compared to others in her vicinity who are more successful than she is. These many feelings come to light throughout the novel, and Winnie attempts to work through each of them while beginning to come to terms with who she truly wants to be.
Fans of folklore and superheroes will fall for Winnie and her spirit from the first pages of the book. She is not perfect, but she is always working hard for what she wants. References to video games, manga, anime, and pop culture appear throughout the book, grounding readers to reality as Winnie's story takes on a supernatural twist. The legend of Hou Yi and Chang E is likewise woven into this story, which is enjoyable for anyone who is familiar with Chinese legends or has seen Over the Moon. And, as food is such a strong element of this story, recipes for two treats described in the book are found at the end for readers to try on their own. This is a stunning overture to the Winnie Zeng series, and it is a delightful inclusion to libraries for middle grade readers.
Katie Zhao’s Winnie Zeng Unleashes a Legend is a laugh out loud funny middle grade novel that beautifully weaves together modern Chinese American life with Chinese mythology in a fast-paced plot.
First-person narrator Winnie is hilarious, often lightening serious moments with her humor. She also shines a light on the pressure middle schoolers face, from fitting in to mountains of homework to extracurriculars. Winnie has to balance battling evil spirits to prevent the world as she knows it from descending into chaos and studying for that pre-algebra test, and the struggle is real. Winnie is a fantastic narrator, who finally shows that being the Chosen One isn’t all its cracked up to be, especially when you have an English test this week. She not only struggles with self-confidence, like every tween and teen, but also with the constant comparisons she has to hear. Her parents compare her to her sister and her rival, the other adults in their close knit Chinese American community compare all the kids to one another and have humble-brag competitions that Winnie expertly narrates, even as she tries to escape to hide in the bathroom.
Winnie Zeng is full of painfully accurate middle school moments— the cafeteria hierarchies, the bake sale drama, the soul crushing loneliness that comes from feeling so alone. Winnie has both universal struggles, such as these, as well as experiences more unique to immigrant heritages, such as her packed lunch being different from the PB&J fare that populates so many other lunch boxes. Zhao expertly shows these moments without slowing the fast pace of the novel, making Winnie not only relatable and endearing, but setting the reader up to cheer her on as she faces bigger and bigger battles.
The action sequences in this book are fantastic. The battles are well-described and often bring in a dose of humor to lighten the moment, as well. Winnie’s fish-out-of-water experience as a hero provides plenty of comedic relief even when the stakes are high, and the reader can’t help but cheer her on through her moments of self-doubt.
The scenes between Winnie and her sister Lisa perfectly encapsulate sisterhood and the struggle that comes with changing people and relationships. Winnie’s ability to receive guidance from her grandmother’s spirit is one that may make young readers cherish their relatives more, and adult readers miss their departed loved ones a little bit more. Lao Lao’s spirit not only helps train Winnie as she develops her abilities, but also helps her see the value in her relationship with her sister.
Winnie Zeng is appealing to all readers, as it has a great balance of characters. The battles, action sequences, emotional discussions, and addressing of bullying would make this an excellent classroom read.
Winnie Zeng Unleashes a Legend will be available 26 April 2022. Thank you to Katie Zhao, Random House Children’s, and NetGalley for an advanced ebook edition such that I could share my honest opinions.