THIS PLACE IS STILL BEAUTIFUL

A stunning, propulsive, moving story about two estranged teen sisters who have no choice but to reunite in their small Midwestern town when their family becomes the victim of a hate crime.

The Flanagan sisters, Annalie and Margaret are different as they come, from personalities, to priorities, to appearance. 17-year-old Annalie is bubbly, sweet but self-conscious, desperate to fit in, and white passing. 19-year-old Margaret is assertive, hard, and looks just like their Chinese immigrant mama, who raised them alone without their white father. When their house is painted with a shocking racial slur, Margaret flies home from her summer internship in New York City to investigate the vandalism, only to learn she's not wanted there. Annalie and Mama would rather keep their heads down and move on. Further, Margaret's investigation makes many members of their predominantly white community uncomfortable, to say the least. Annalie would rather spend her summer focusing on the fact that her lifelong crush, the soccer star and underwear model lookalike Thom Froggett, has suddenly shown interest in her. Margaret, meanwhile, ends up contending with more ghosts from her past than she ever planned to, including her high school sweetheart, Rajiv Agarwal, who dumped her a year ago for a very good reason. As the sisters navigate this unexpected summer, an explosive secret lurking beneath the hate crime threatens to break their relationship apart, once and for all. Like in THE VANISHING HALF by Brit Bennett, the sisters come from the same root, they are forced to navigate the world differently in huge part due to the race with which they most identify and/or present as, illuminating the arbitrary yet determinative nature of race in our society. Yuxi Tian is a New York City-based attorney at Google by day and a writer by night. She immigrated from China when she was a year old, and grew up in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois on which Margaret and Annalie's town is based. Before working at Google, Yuxi attended Harvard Law School, and for a brief period dabbled in the idea of becoming a literary agent and read manuscripts for The Bent Agency while working at a private law practice in DC.