The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin

From Goodreads,

"A special edition of a modern classic by the Newbery-Award winning and bestselling author of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

When Pacy's mom tells her that this is a good year for friends, family, and "finding herself," Pacy begins searching right away. As the year goes on, she struggles to find her talent, deals with disappointment, makes a new best friend, and discovers just why the Year of the Dog is a lucky one for her after all.
This funny and profound book is a wonderful debut novel by award-winning and bestselling author and illustrator Grace Lin, and young readers will be sure to love and treasure it for years to come.
This special edition of the modern classic features over 15 pages of new content, including deleted stories, a Q&A with the author and editor, photos from the author's childhood, and more!"

Goodreads - The Year of the Dog

Awards and Nominations:

• Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Youth Literature Honor (2006)

The Year of the Dog follows a young girl named Pacy who is struggling to figure out who she is.  She knows that it is her lucky year because it is the year of the dog.  She is determined to find out who she is, what special talent she has, and what the year will hold for her.  

This book had a lot potential, but it felt like a real let down.  The book made this big point about how Pacy was going to "find herself".  I don't feel like that happened.  I thought that she was going to go through some big transformation and discover who she really was.  I expected there to be a change in her character, but it didn't happen.  Finding herself just meant that she decided she wanted to write books when she got older.  If deciding what you want to do when you grow up means you've found yourself, then I found myself in third grade.  I felt like there needed to be a grander transformation of finding herself or it didn't need to be such a big point in the book.

While there's not a lot that I enjoyed about this book, I did like that it is based loosely on true events from the author's childhood.  There is an afterword where Lin mentions that she chose to write this book because she wanted to see more characters like her in literature.  I love that she included this note because it really gave me a better understanding and appreciation of this book.  I do feel that we need more diversity in children's literature.  So many kids aren't exposed to diverse people and culture.  I love that authors are writing about things that are lacking in children's literature. 

This wasn't my favorite book and I don't plan to read the other books in this series.  The book was too scattered.  It also had a huge build up of finding yourself and it flopped.  I have to give this 2 stars.  I will probably put this in my classroom library, but I feel it will be a book that will sit untouched for months.