Outrun the Moon

Lee, Stacey. Outrun the Moon. 2016. 391p. 607 mins. Available as an audiobook from Overdrive.

Mercy Wong is dedicated to achieving her goal of owning her own enterprise and pulling her family out of poverty. Living with her little brother, her mother, and her father in a small apartment in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1906, Mercy experiences daily discrimination. Her father runs a laundromat and works sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Her younger brother is sick and frequently needs medicines. Her mother is a fortune teller who has predicted her own death. Americans dislike the Chinese and have closed off their borders to more Chinese immigration, so even though Mercy is born in the United States and therefore a citizen, she’s considered an alien by the local population.

Having read and thoroughly internalized a treatise on business, Mercy embarks on a mission to join the most prestigious high school for girls in San Francisco, the St. Clare’s School for Girls, where the scions of San Francisco’s rich families go to perfect their education and social graces before meeting a husband. Mercy, however, plans on developing her business acumen and make contacts. Her friend Tom, whom she is romantically interested in, wants to build air machines and refuses to join his father in his herbalist business, planning instead to move to Seattle to work with a certain individual named Boeing.

Mercy convinces Mister Du Lac, a board member of the school and the owner of the most prestigious chocolate maker in the country to help her join the school. She has to pretend to be a Chinese heiress even though she’s never been to China and doesn’t know many of her culture’s more refined customs. None of that deters Mercy, however, who will persevere through mean girls at the boarding school, a strict and disciplinarian headmistress, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fires that destroy most of the city to achieve her goals of not only succeeding in American society but changing it as well. Filled with humor, this book provides a great look at a relatively unknown period of American history.