The Great Wall of Lucy Wu






Shang, Wan-Long, W. (2011). The great wall of Lucy Wu. New York: Scholastic. It's sure to be a great sixth grade year for Lucy Wu. After all, she will have freedom, privacy, and a room to herself now that her sister is leaving for college. Plus, she and her best friend Madison are sure to dominate the basketball courts this year. But the best laid plans of sixth graders are sure to go awry--especially when a heretofore unknown great-aunt from China comes for an extended visit and shares Lucy's space. Lucy draws a line down the center of the room to insure that the elderly woman stays on her side of the room. In fact, she even builds a furniture wall so that her message is delivered: This side is mine, and you are not welcome here. Li Po handles all this with great aplomb, simply going about her routine. Lucy meanwhile must deal with her mother's insistence that she attend Chinese language school on the weekends, which unfortunately conflicts with basketball practice. Clearly, Lucy is caught between two cultures. While her friend seems to appreciate Li Po's wonderful cooking more than Lucy does, eventually Lucy comes to realize that her great-aunt actually has much to offer and loves her. A conflict with Sloane, a classmate determined to be in charge of the basketball team for a school competition, gives rise to all sorts of antics since the winner will be determined by the number of cans brought in for the area food bank. In the end Lucy realizes that she has many more supporters than she ever realized, and that perhaps she, herself, has been holding herself back.

Favorite Line:

“I wish there were a way to record flavors the way you can record music, and then you could play it over and over in your mouth” (p. 83).