Ruby Lost and Found

With three starred reviews, this contemporary middle grade maps one girl’s quest to visit her late Ye-Ye’s favorite spots in San Francisco’s Chinatown and her fight against gentrification with a new friend. 

Thanks to her ye-ye’s epic scavenger hunts, Ruby Chu knows San Francisco like the back of her hand. But when he dies, she feels lost. It seems like everyone, from her best friends to her older sister, is abandoning her—and after Ruby gets caught skipping lunch to avoid sitting alone, she’s staring down a summer spent at her nai-nai’s senior center. When a new boy from Ruby’s class, Liam Yeung, starts showing up, too, Ruby’s humiliation is complete.

But Nai-Nai, her friends, and Liam all surprise Ruby. She finds herself working with Liam, who might not be as annoying as he seems, to help save a historic Chinatown bakery that’s being priced out of the neighborhood. Alongside Nai-Nai, who is keeping a secret that threatens to change everything, Ruby retraces Ye-Ye’s scavenger hunt maps in an attempt to find a way out of her grief—and maybe even find herself. 

Christina Li is the author of the middle grade novels Clues to the Universe and Ruby Lost and Found, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Children's Literature, as well as the forthcoming teen novel True Love and Other Impossible Odds. At any given time she is probably daydreaming about characters and drinking too much jasmine green tea. She grew up in the Midwest and California but now calls New York home