Currently jobless and unable to sustain a relationship, 35-year-old Mika Suzuki is a real trial for her traditional Japanese American parents. Then she receives a call from Penny, the daughter she gave up for adoption 16 years earlier, and the desire to look good in Penny's eyes leads Mika to small lies, then wilder embellishments, then the determination to succeed. A first adult novel from the author of Tokyo Ever After, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Summer YA Book Club pick; with a 100,000-copy first printing.

In her first foray into adult fiction, Jean introduces the reader to Mika Suzuki. Mika is 35 and not exactly living her dreams. She's just been fired, her roommate might be a hoarder, her last boyfriend hates her, and her relationship with her mother is chilly at best. The last thing Mika is expecting is a call from the daughter she gave up for adoption 16 years before. Penny, now a teenager and excited to learn about her own heritage as a Japanese American, steps into Mika's messy life. Mika must reevaluate all the decisions that have led her here and reexamine the dreams she abandoned. Her attempts to impress her daughter (and her daughter's adoptive father, Thomas) are sometimes clumsy but ultimately successful. Mika, though, is uncertain she deserves all she wants--love, romance, and a relationship with her daughter. Jean (Tokyo Ever After, 2021) sets her novel within the Asian American community of Portland, Oregon. Her characters are modern and honest, and the romance is realistic. Smart, funny, and affecting.

In Jean's breezy adult debut (after the Tokyo Ever After YA fantasy series), a woman encounters the daughter she gave up for adoption. Mika Suzuki is recovering from a failed relationship and has just been laid off from her latest dead-end job in Portland, Ore., when she receives a call from Penny Calvin, whom she gave birth to 16 years earlier. Penny, who was raised in Ohio by white adoptive parents, and whose mother has died, wants to meet Mika. Mika, too, wants to meet but chooses to invent a more enviable version of herself, which means staging an elaborate and rickety deception involving a hunky boyfriend and ownership of an art gallery. When the ruse inevitably fails, in part because of the interference of Mika's difficult Japanese mother, Mika is left to try to forge new, more realistic bonds with Penny--and with Penny's attractive adoptive attorney father Thomas. Jean ties up the loose ends a bit neatly after a prolonged and increasingly steamy flirtation between Mika and Thomas, but there's plenty to chew on about interracial adoption and the varieties of mother-daughter experience and conflict. Aside from the familiar rom-com subplot, this gets the job done nicely. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary Management. (Aug.)