The New Kid Code: Wrong Kind of Familiar

Maya Reyes has already lived in Japan. Three years at a base in Okinawa — the ocean, the language, the whole island worked into her bones. So when her dad's Air Force orders move the family to Yokota, outside Tokyo, Maya is sure of one thing: she has a head start nobody else has. She knows this country.

She does not know this country.

Yokota is cold where Okinawa was warm, mountains where Okinawa was sea, a forty-minute train from a city of ten million lights. The Japanese sounds different. The food is different. And a girl in her seventh-grade class named Hana was born here — and knows a hundred things Maya's Okinawa never taught her.

Maya has spent eight years and a whole notebook of hard-won rules learning how to be the new kid. Now she has to learn the harder thing: that recognizing a place is not the same as knowing it, and the Japan she loves isn't this one. With her dad facing a deployment and a friendship she can't quite read, can Maya let a place she thought she knew become somewhere brand new?