The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee

Gr 7-10–Korean American actor Park (yes, Yuna from canceled Alaska Daily!) makes her audio debut with We Need Diverse Books cofounder Oh’s hybrid adventure—equal parts contemporary teen drama, superhero web comic, and parallel-world speculative fiction. Youthful Park imbues Mina with an impressive emotive range, while also clearly enjoying the sizable cast, seamlessly channeling best friends, mean girls, judgmental relatives, nasty villains, bewildered scientists, and that dreamy love interest. Mina misses her beloved artist mother, who Mina's grieving busy father seems to want to erase and her paternal Korean family expects her to follow her cousins’ overachievement. Mina’s web comic is one of her few escapes; after honest feedback from her BFFs, her virtual world becomes all too real (anything to escape SAT prep?). Suddenly she’s fallen into her panels and is on the verge of losing narrative control.