KT: Mika is wonderful and talented, but she still carries around the feeling that she’s not good enough. How did you go about creating Mika and all the characteristics that she embodies? Overall this is a beautifully written heartwarming story that I highly recommend. Even if you aren’t touched by adoption I think anyone can relate to this story. It feels a bit like a coming of age story but Mika is already an adult. It is wholly imperfectly perfect. Emiko Jean has a way of writing characters who are complex, interesting, flawed, and relatable. I appreciated the complicated family dynamics that were written with care. Entertaining, funny and uplifting. Exploring identity, motherhood and second chances, it's one of the most life-affirming books to come out of 2022 Culturefly Wow, I did not expect the depth of feeling I found in this book. An amazing and insightful look into adoption, trauma, culture, friendship and the mother-daughter relationship. I LOVED this story.

It's really refreshing to read a book featuring a character like Mika. She doesn't have her life all together, in fact it is not together at all. Throughout the course of the book she learns how to accept that all of her expectations might not be met, especially when it comes to her relationship with her mother. Mika has to come to the acceptance that people are who they are, they can't always be who you want or need them to be. EJ: I think it’s really universal. When you have a kid, there’s all this stuff where it’s supposed to be innate. Like you’re supposed to know how to care for your baby. Like it’s just supposed to be all natural and wonderful. And I didn’t know s--t [about] taking care of babies. So, I think a lot of women have felt like that before.Emotions: Emotions are beautiful. Especially when they are written with honest commitment. That is definitely the case of the emotions in this book. I will gladly admit to having ugly cried while reading this. And so, all of those things shape her. So, she didn’t have a great upbringing. And then, she had all these societal pressures [and] pressure from her mother. And so, all of that kind of became hands that pushed her down into being pretty inactive in her own life.

There are important maternal elements explored here. Mika has always felt like she disappointed her mother and they do not have a great relationship. Penny decides that she wants to meet her grandmother. How does Penny reconcile her relationship with Mika with the one she had with her adopted mother? At thirty-five, Mika Suzuki's life is a mess. Her last relationship ended in flames. Her roommate-slash-best friend might be a hoarder. She's a perpetual disappointment to her traditional Japanese parents. And, most recently, she's been fired from her latest dead-end job. But I think what it means overall is there are things that we put in the water, and we don’t know where they’ll end up. So, we do everything we can as parents to kind of like build our little kid boats. And we do it with all the best intentions. We equip them with everything we can, but we really don’t know what storms they’re gonna face and what leaks they’re going to spring. That’s a really bad metaphor, but you know, some things can’t be helped. It’s about acceptance and moving on and, like, permission to leave something in the past. All she’d wanted was to protect Penny from the truth… She had wanted to show Penny that the adoption had been worth it for both of them.” Will do." Mika hung up and dropped her phone in her purse. A minute passed. Mika wandered. Her phone rang. Might be Hana again. Or her mother -- Hiromi had already left a message that morning. I just stopped by the church and met the new congregant. His name is Hayato, and he works for Nike. I gave him your number.

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I also really like the idea, and I’m stealing this from Mr. Rogers, from a show where he said you don’t have to be special to be loved. And I would love for readers to take away the idea that everybody deserves love. In her quest to be a person her daughter Penny is proud of, Mika creates a few white lies which, of course, end up snowballing into something way bigger than she ever imagined. While this storyline seems predictable at first, it ends up being the foundation of a novel that capture the essence of what makes a parent and what makes a life. Uh oh. Mika realizes she doesn’t want Penny to see her real life and circumstances. One little lie leads to a whole fake life that Mika builds. Her friends rally behind her, and Penny’s arrival day finally happens. I hoped things would work out, but I had doubts that this was the best way to build an authentic relationship. Mika’s character was beautiful and flawed. I loved how relatable she was and how we delved into her guilt, longing, sadness, regret and finding happiness. I really enjoyed the letters about Penny and how it gave the book almost a diary/memoir kind of feel. I also loved Mika’s friendship with Hana. I feel like everyone needs a Hana in their life and it really was bright spot in the story. So when Penny reveals to Mika that she's headed to Portland (adopted father, protective-yet-hunky Thomas, in tow) to meet her...Mika panics. Enlisting the help of her best friend and roommate Hana, can she find a way to meld her fantasy life with her real one? Or is Mika truly doomed to disappoint the most precious person in her world...and lose ALL of her remaining dreams in one fell swoop?

Even the relationship that Mika and her biological daughter, Penny, were trying to build was written in a way that creates empathy in readers without needing to have gone through that same experience themselves. EJ: It’s never really one thing. For Mika, I pulled from some personal experiences, like especially my younger self, because in the book, Mika really reflects on her “before,” like before she had Penny, and before she was assaulted.

And my son had just thrown up. He didn’t have Covid; he had some other mutant virus, and my daughter had just thrown a tantrum. And I shoved them in front of the television, and I had 30 minutes to get these photographs taken. And so, I just put some makeup on, and I did part of my hair. I painted the fingernails on one hand because that’s all that would show in the photo.