After finding the family’s cookbook, the boys decide to secretly bake all the Pie in the Sky cakes. Piece by piece readers learn it was Jingwen’s father’s dream to open a cake shop called Pie in the Sky in Australia before he suddenly passed away. While Yanghao quickly picks up English, Jingwen resists, struggling in lessons and to make friends. Quickly he realizes it is he and Yanghao who must appear to be the Martians to everyone else, comically literalized with pictures of a four-eyed, antennae’d Jingwen. The boys start at the Northbridge Primary School not knowing any English, which has Jingwen feeling they have just arrived on Mars. The family is Chinese, though their home country is never specified. In this graphic/prose hybrid novel, 12-year-old Jingwen, his little brother, Yanghao, and their mother immigrate to Australia. Two brothers navigate a new country, a new language, and grief through cake.
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