Like the sea cucumber, Ellen, the multicultural 9-year-old narrator of Linda Watanabe McFerrin's delightful first novel, cannot be easily classified. Animal or vegetable? Living and feeling, or merely alive? Looking at one of these specimens, Ellen laments, "It must be horrible to be so strange that nobody knows what you really are."
The eldest of four lively children of a Scottish father and a half-American, half-Japanese mother, Ellen finds her own strangeness magnified when her family leaves America to travel to Japan to care for Hanabe, the ailing grandmother Ellen has never met.
Ellen is sent to Tokyo to live with the begrudging Hanabe. Torn between cultures and worlds in a place whose language she does not know, she is forced by the shock of displacement to call her own identity into question.