XiXi Tian

This Place Is Still Beautiful

The Flanagan sisters are as different as they come. Seventeen-year-old Annalie is bubbly, sweet, and self-conscious, where nineteen-year-old Margaret is sharp and assertive. Margaret looks just like their mother, where Annalie passes for white and looks like the father who abandoned them years ago, leaving their Chinese immigrant mama to raise the girls alone in their small, predominantly white Midwestern town.

When their house is vandalized with a shocking racial slur, Margaret rushes home from her summer internship in New York City. She expects outrage. Instead, her sister and mother would rather keep their heads down and move on. Especially once Margaret's own investigation begins to make members of their community uncomfortable.

For Annalie, this was meant to be a summer of new possibilities, and she resents her sister’s sudden presence and insistence on drawing negative attention to their family. Meanwhile Margaret is infuriated with Annalie’s passive acceptance of what happened. For Margaret, the summer couldn’t possibly get worse, until she crosses paths with someone she swore she’d never see again: her first love, Rajiv Agarwal, who broke up with her the year before for a very good reason.

As the sisters navigate this unexpected summer, an explosive secret simmering below the surface threatens to break their relationship apart, once and for all.

This Place Is Still Beautiful is a luminous, captivating story about identity, the complicated bonds of sisterhood, and how our hometowns are inextricably a part of who we are, even when we outgrow them.

Publisher: HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray
Publication Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 9780063086029

Blurbs coming soon!

Available for order:

EPIC READS US | PENGUIN UK

XiXi Tian was born in China and immigrated to the United States when she was a year old. She grew up in central Illinois. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in history and then attended Harvard Law School. She is a tech lawyer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

https://www.xixiwrites.com/

Tags: YA, Contemporary, BIPOC