To Have and Have More

Author's note: This hardcover is an outdated edition. The paperback
("Sanibel's Version") presents the author's revised and preferred text with
exclusives not included in the ebook, audiobook, or hardcover editions.

Told through the eyes of a Korean girl adopted into a wealthy white family,
this darkly funny debut explores casual racism, privilege, and the
complexities of friendship.

Derrymore Academy circa 2007 is home to teenagers who have their eyebrows
shaped and their sweet sixteens tented. Their first kisses arrive around
the same time as their boating licenses and they celebrate getting their
braces off with Mediterranean vacations. It is here that Emery Hooper,
adopted at birth into the country club set, thrives.

The one blight on her otherwise perfect life? Lilah Chang. The Taiwanese
American student is the embarrassing epitome of every Asian stereotype
Emery despises―and is inexplicably determined to become Emery's friend.

Lilah is both astounded and hopelessly self-conscious around the casual
wealth at Derrymore, where students treat laptops as disposable and weekend
spending is limited only by imagination and audacity. Desperate to fit in,
she's fascinated by Emery: an Asian girl who is somehow wholly comfortable
in a white world.

When Emery's wealth isn't enough to protect her from increasing
microaggressions, Lilah and Emery develop a complicated friendship that
tentatively unites them against the undercurrent of white privilege at
their school. As they speed toward graduation and Ivy League applications,
Lilah and Emery circle around the truth that still irrevocably separates
them: With enough money, actions don't have consequences.

Sanibel grew up in Princeton and studied Classics at the University of Pennsylvania before getting her MFA at The New School. Her essays appear in New York, Air Mail, ELLE, and Lit Hub. She lives in Greenwich Village with her husband and is currently working on a satirical reimagining of The Odyssey from Athena's POV.