I Want Candy
More than anything, 14-year-old Candace Ong wants not to be stuck as a waitress in a restaurant like Eggroll Wonderland; that’s the one in San Francisco’s Chinatown where her joyless parents work, night and day, and embarrass their daughter with their fractured English. She is also getting extremely tired of playing the role of smart—but pudgy—sidekick to her best friend, the beautiful and very sexy Ruby Ping. But playing a new part isn’t always easy, and Candace makes some often funny, sometimes sad mistakes, most of them of a sexual, vaguely Lolitaesque nature. As she did in her first two novels, The Dim Sum of All Things (2004) and Buddha Baby (2005), Keltner explores the rigors of finding one’s identity as a member of two cultures. Her introduction of magical realism into the latter part of her book is a bit disconcerting to the reader but helpful to Candace in discovering important aspects of her Chinese heritage. --Michael Cart