Presenting Laurence Yep Hardcover - 1995 - 1st Edition

"Everyone needs someone, even if it's just to scratch their back". So says a young boy to a lonely dragon named Shimmer in Laurence Yep's Dragon of the Lost Sea (1983). These words seal a friendship that endures against great odds, and they announce the theme that makes Yep (b. 1948) one of today's most beloved young adult authors: the theme of the outsider seeking identity and connection in a strange, foreign world. Teenagers, Yep has said, are "outsiders in their own bodies", and through his science fiction, fantasy, and historical and contemporary novels he offers young people strategies for growing up and fitting in. As Dianne Johnson-Feelings elegantly demonstrates in this unique study of all of this author's most important works, Yep's experiences as a Chinese American in San Francisco fill his stories with firsthand knowledge of what it's like to be an outsider. Johnson-Feelings reveals Yep's intentional parallels between aliens and immigrants, as well as the deep humanity behind his portraits of outsiders struggling to cross boundaries of ethnic stereotyping and social class. And she shows us how Yep's characters rise above these limitations by virtue of their moral strength, as in The Mark Twain Murders (1981) and The Tom Sawyer Fires (1984), two novels about a homeless boy in Civil War San Francisco. Throughout her readings, Johnson-Feelings offers quotations from her interviews with Yep and from his autobiography, and these brightly illuminate his motivation and inspiration - as well as his borrowings from Chinese mythology and his own family history.