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Kelly Yang in Lexington

Clarke Middle School

Tuesday, October 20

6:30 – 8:00 PM

Kelly Yang will speak and sign books at the auditorium, Diamond Middle School, 99 Hancock Street, Lexington, on Tuesday October 20, 6:30 – 8 PM. Seating will be first come, first served. No registration required. The program is made possible thanks to a grant from the Cary Library Foundation.

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A lissa Lauzon, Cary Library’s Head of Youth Services, calls Kelly Yang “one of the dominant voices in middle grade literature right now.” Lauzon and her colleagues are delighted that the New York Times bestselling author has chosen Cary Library to host her only Boston-area public appearance on her upcoming book tour in October.

Celebrating the publication of the new graphic novel adaptation of her award-winning debut novel Front Desk, Yang’s talk and book signing will take place at Clarke Middle School on Tuesday, October 20, from 6:30 – 8:00 pm.

An Instant Classic
Front Desk, published in 2018, introduced Mia Tang, a smart, brave, resourceful 10-year-old Chinese American girl who covers the front desk of a motel while her overworked immigrant parents keep things running behind the scenes.

Based partly on Yang’s experience of helping her Chinese immigrant parents run motels in Southern California, from ages eight to twelve, the novel was acclaimed as “one of the best books of the 21st century” by Kirkus Reviews, won the 2019 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, the Parents’ Choice Gold Medal, and was named a best book of the year by Amazon, the Washington Post, the School Library Journal, NPR, and Publishers Weekly.

Yang, 42, has published over fifteen books, ranging from picture books to her first adult novel, The Take (2026). She added five more titles to the Front Desk series and branched out into young adult novels with Parachutes (2020) and Private Label (2022). The Front Desk series is “exceptionally popular with kids,” said Lauzon. “Every kid that reads it loves it, wants the next book immediately, and has a lot to say about it,” she said.

Part of Yang’s appeal, said Lauzon, is that her characters are immediately relatable to readers with many different backgrounds and life experiences. Yang assumes that her readers are smart, thoughtful, curious observers of the world around them, and her books tackle tough topics including poverty, racism, bullying, the impact of social media, and family conflict, without sugar-coating, but with humor and optimism, “kid-friendly and accessible,” said Lauzon.

Personal History
Cary Teen Services Manager Laura Harrington has been a fan of Yang’s books since she read Front Desk in 2020 with her son, then in fifth grade. Reading the story together sparked “many great discussions,” she said, and she was impressed by Yang’s ability to dramatize thorny issues in terms that her 11-year-old son could relate to.

Inspired by Yang’s upcoming visit, Harrington has chosen her young adult novel, Parachutes, to re-launch the Lexington High School Book Club, after a hiatus during the library renovation project. This story of two young women from very different backgrounds finding their voices and speaking up against sexual harassment and assault is “not the easiest read,” Harrington said, but she is confident from previous discussions with teen readers that students will find it gripping and empowering.

In her Author’s note at the end of Parachutes, Yang writes that parts of the story reflect her experience of being raped by a fellow student when she was in her first year at Harvard Law School. She was eighteen years old, having already graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

After a bruising internal University investigation that failed to suspend or expel her well-connected attacker, she herself was investigated for “malicious prosecution.” She was exonerated, graduated, and left Harvard and any thoughts of a legal career behind her. One of her aims in writing Parachutes, she wrote, was to encourage schools to “prioritize protecting the students, not the brand.”

Like Front Desk, said Harrington, Parachutes is a prime example of Yang’s ability to “take her personal experience and fictionalize it in a way that really grips the population she’s writing for.” “Kids appreciate that authenticity,” says Lauzon, noting that Yang’s books often provide openings to conversations about difficult topics in discussion groups. She hopes the graphic version of Front Desk will attract a new group of readers, noting that graphic novels are one of the library’s highest circulating collections. Kirkus Reviews hails the new version as “a fun, vibrant graphic rendition of a beloved modern classic.”

Kelly Yang on Graphic Novels, Libraries, Reading, Writing and Being an Outsider

Speaking recently by Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, Kelly Yang described how it felt to be involved with Front Desk’s transformation into a graphic novel. “Obviously, it’s a very personal story,” she said. “So it was exciting and also a little nerve-wracking to see an adaptation.”
Yang worked closely with Fumio Obata, the “amazing” Japanese-born artist and illustrator chosen for the project, “going through each draft and looking at all the panels.” Obata lives and works in the UK, and Yang gave tactful guidance on giving a more Californian vibe to some of the settings: “lots of feedback like, this is what our cafeterias look like, this is what a classroom looks like,” she said, laughing.

To see her characters and their actions and emotions illustrated has been moving and exciting, said Yang. “I’m so pleased and impressed because all of the humor, all of the emotions translated so beautifully on to the page,” she said.

There are plans to turn more Front Desk books into graphic novels, Yang said, but it’s a slow process. A graphic novel takes a minimum of two years to complete, she said, whereas she can write a book in a few months and have it on shelves within a year.

Books, libraries, and a fast-track education
“I went to eight different schools for eight different grades,” said Yang, “so I wasn’t someone who could make friends easily, because I’d moved around so much.” Even with people she became friendly with, she kept her home life in a succession of motels strictly private. In a new school, she would always seek out the library. “And if I saw all my favorite books there, it was almost like, well, I’m not alone because there’s Charlotte’s Web and Babysitters Club and Stuart Little – I kind of thought of the books as my friends,” she said.

Perhaps even more important than the books were the librarians. “I’ve just been blessed with great librarians in my life,” said Yang. She gives all credit to her teachers, too, but the librarians were special, in that they had no interest in grades or performance. “The librarian I felt was a safe person who never gave me a grade and would be genuinely interested in me as a person and not need anything back. That transformed me, transformed my life,” she said.

Another transformation came after she took an early entrance exam for California State University Los Angeles and was accepted as a freshman at age 13. Two years later, she transferred to UC Berkeley, from where she graduated in 2002 at age 17. Although she had dreamed of writing books since childhood, she knew no authors who came from similar backgrounds to hers, and decided to study law as it “seemed like something that people who were good at reading and writing could do.”

If writing was Yang’s passport to a place at the ultra-competitive Harvard Law School, it was also the life raft that kept her afloat after the sexual assault in her first year, and the traumatic aftermath. After her disillusionment with the law school, Yang clung to her identity as a writer, “which no one could ever take from me, because no matter what happened to me, I could write about it. There was a comfort and a superpower in that, which really saved my life,” she said.

While still studying law, she experimented with fiction, and after leaving Harvard with her JD degree she moved to Hong Kong. There, she married, had three children, and rebuilt her confidence and a new career as a writing teacher and journalist. Telling her own stories and sharing the power of writing by teaching children became her mission, and she founded The Kelly Yang Project, (kellyyang.edu.hk) a writing and debating program that has reached thousands of children across Asia.

The Outsider Advantage

Born in China, transplanted to California at age six, a freshman in college at 13 and law school student at 18, Yang said “I feel like I’ve been the wrong age pretty much my entire life!” In college, she was out of synch emotionally with her much older classmates, though intellectually precocious and powered by a strong work ethic.

Even after her move to Hong Kong, “where it was really nice to be surrounded by people who look like me,” as a Mandarin speaker she never became completely fluent in Cantonese, the majority Chinese language there. “I was still an outsider,” she said. “Then moving back to the US, I had to become an immigrant again. So I think my whole life is just being out of place!”

Yang said that her experience of constant readjustment to new settings has helped her “appreciate every place that I’m at for the time I’m there.” It has also fed her boundless curiosity, and her drive to tell good stories in many different formats, for different audiences. “I’m always trying to understand the world we live in,” she said, “because our world is changing so much, and I think it’s really important to keep up with figuring that out in books.”