It's probably a good thing I didn't know about the Great Expectations angle until after I started reading -- I have terrible memories of that book from 7th grade -- but this book is clever and Pippa is a great character. I'm a big fan of her loving family (even if they have high expectations) and her solid skill with basketball. Friendship drama, some cyberbullying, some poverty shaming. Mother had to return to Korea, Pippa lives in Western Mass with her sister and husband. Very tween coming of age -- making mistakes, learning and taking responsibility. Really well done.
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Seventh-grader Pippa Park lives with her older sister, Mina, and Mina's husband, Jung-Hwa. Mina runs a laundromat and Jung-Hwa works at a factory; Mina and Pippa's mother lives back in Korea. Mina is strict with Pippa and has forbidden her to be on Victoria Middle's basketball team this year due to her grades, but when Pippa gets scouted by a fancy private school and her scholarship is contingent on her playing basketball, Mina agrees. At her new school, Pippa tries to fit in with the "Royals," popular girls (some nice, some mean), but soon someone is cyberbullying her. Between that, stressing over her math grades, and worrying that her new friends will learn who she really is, Pippa is struggling - and then her mom is in a car accident.

Pippa makes a series of familiar bad choices. Her motivation for wanting a new life is murky, and her desire to remain friends with the Royals is told more than shown. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile middle grade story featuring a sympathetic character plunged into a new world.

Quotes

Stereotypes sucked, but sometimes not being able to live up to the stereotype ["Aren't Asians supposed to be good at math?"] felt even worse. (19)

How could Mina forbid me from playing on the team? It was the one thing I was really good at, and she had taken it away from me. (40)

Had that been a successful encounter - or a terrible one? And why was it so hard to tell the difference between the two? (73)

I hadn't exactly lied, but I hadn't corrected people's wrong ideas about me - and it was getting harder and harder to keep the truth hidden.... I'd wanted a different life, but changing myself into the popular, private school Pippa had left me feeling more alone than ever. (146)

...I felt haunted by the sense I was missing out on something fun somewhere. (157)

"Remember...the lower you fall, the more room you have to rise. This will pass, eventually." (Jung-Hwa to Pippa, 233)

...most of what he said was stuff that I already knew deep down. (234) ( )

Really engaging middle-grade story about family, friendship, and fitting in. Pippa was under so much pressure with school and basketball and family stuff on top of being the new kid at a fancy school, and I just wanted good things for her! I liked this one a lot.

(Received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.) ( )

A loose re-telling of Great Expectations, though it’s the original aspects like Pippa’s family where this shone brightest.

There still aren’t that many books that feature female athletes, so it was great to see Pippa participating in this sport she loves, playing basketball with the aggression of a star player yet at the same time being a good teammate.

Since Pippa spends much of the novel pursuing popularity at the expense of friends and family, she makes plenty of choices along the way that will make you cringe, but at the same time, it’s such an identifiable situation, at some point practically everyone has compromised who they are to some degree in an effort to fit in only to regret it later, so you can’t help but feel for Pippa and root for her to see the errors of her ways, to see that despite how others make you feel, there really isn’t any shame in having less money or a different culture.

When it came to the character of Eliot, hewing close to Great Expectations, having him be cold and aloof like Estella, well, it kind of sucked the joy out of experiencing Pippa’s crush alongside her since this boy never ever felt worthy of her admiration, ninety-nine percent of the time he’s rude to her for no reason and I just found myself wishing she would tell him off. Ultimately, I thought Eliot and his family drama didn’t feel all that necessary to telling Pippa’s story, it just kind of seemed like something wedged in to represent that part of Great Expectations, not that it was poorly written, I just felt like I would have rather those pages maybe focused on her friendship with Buddy or something else that was more personal to Pippa than Eliot’s family.

That’s why Pippa’s family scenes were easily my favorites in the book because of how intimate and personal they felt. I loved the dynamics of their family, the sister who has to step in as mom to Pippa, who feels she has to be harder on her than a sister would want to be, the brother-in-law who is the sweetest guy around, I can’t imagine any reader not adoring him, and Pippa, who fights Mina at every turn as kids will do, she is very much their daughter even if it isn’t in the conventional sense. I had such empathy for each of them, for Mina so often having to be the “bad guy,” for Jung forever trying to play peacemaker, and for Pippa, too, who has these painful moments of being ashamed of her family circumstances because the outside world has made her feel that way, there’s something very real about those emotions, their household, in the arguments with the undercurrent of warmth, in comforting with food, in being there for Pippa when she’s messed up and all she expects is their disappointment in her, those are the moments I’ll remember, the reasons I’ll read more from this author. ( )