This was a fun sweet YA book. I really liked that the characters talked so much about their Chinese traditions. I wish that a book like this had existed when I was an adolescent!

Stylistically, it always bothers me when authors overuse sentence fragments. There were a lot of instances of this in the first few chapters and it almost made me stop reading this book because I find it so annoying and unnecessary. I'm glad I kept reading, but I really wish authors would stop using this device for ~dramatic effect.

Each chapter is written in the first person and alternates between the two main characters. I still do not understand why the author chose to use accent marks in the chapters told by the female character and used no accent marks on the same words in the chapters narrated by the male character. Frankly, it was confusing and inconsistent. Either use accent marks or don't, but why only use them half the time?

The other confusing aspect was that the female main character's mother is from Hong Kong while her paternal grandmother emigrated from Taiwan, yet the pinyin (anglicized Chinese) used throughout the book is Mandarin. My mother grew up in Chicago's Chinatown (where this book takes place) and my father's parents lived there for most of my childhood, so I visited Chinatown often in my youth. Everyone there spoke Cantonese. My dad was the only person I knew who spoke Mandarin, and he learned it in school (his first language was Cantonese which he with everyone in Chinatown).

The other giveaway was the use of nainai, which is the term used for a paternal grandmother in the southern parts of China that speak Mandarin (like Shanghai). In Cantonese, a paternal grandmother is called ma ma. It's likely that the makeup of Chinatown has more Mandarin speakers now, but the use of Mandarin by all of the characters in this book was not something I was expecting.

The other thing I wish had been touched on was the environmental impact of both sky lanterns and water lanterns. I have been to ceremonies for both and there are ways to use them without accidentally setting trees/houses on fire or creating waste that is harmful to animals. Instead of sending hundreds of lanterns out onto Lake Michigan to turn into trash that various birds, mammals, and fish will ingest, you can have a water lantern ceremony at an enclosed body of water (like a small pond or at a park). In Hawaii, they have an annual water lantern ceremony with a rope going across the inlet so that none of the lanterns drift out into the ocean to become garbage. Outside of Las Vegas, there's an annual sky lantern ceremony held in the desert so that there's nothing the lanterns will accidentally set on fire. The day after, the company collects all the lanterns that have landed on the ground after the candle burns out.