Eureka
by Victoria Chang
Intermediate, Middle School    Farrar    272 pp.
1/26    9780374393533    $18.99

In this emotive novel in verse, Chang delves into a lesser-known event in America’s history: the violent 1885 eviction of the Chinese residents of Eureka, a town in northern California. Readers follow Mei Mei, a resilient twelve-year-old whose parents send her to live with relatives three hundred miles away from her home in San Francisco’s Chinatown in order to avoid anti-Chinese prejudice and hopefully attend school. Instead, Mei Mei encounters more hardship when she’s forced to work as a kitchen servant for the Bobbitts, a rich white banking family. Making the best of things, Mei Mei befriends the other Chinese workers in the household as well as Sara Bobbitt, who wants to be a teacher and gives Mei Mei reading lessons. Racial animosity in Eureka grows, and Mei Mei witnesses a mob attacking her uncle. The accidental murder of a local white politician is what triggers the forced exodus from Eureka. Chang’s intense poetry balances traumatic experiences with moments of bravery and kindness as Mei Mei is supported by her new family of friends and eventually reunites with her parents. Vivid descriptions and imagery effectively convey the roughness of life in late-nineteenth-century California. An author’s note provides historical context; two pages of “Interesting Facts” are appended.

From the January/February 2026 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.