Front Desk

Front Desk is a children's novel by Kelly Yang, published by Arthur A. Levine Books in 2018 and the first in a series. It is set in the early 1990s and narrated by Mia Tang, a ten-year-old whose immigrant parents have taken on the management of the Calivista Motel in California after their own jobs and savings fell through.

Mia's days are spent at the front desk while her parents clean rooms, and she carries three secrets: the family lives in the motel rather than a house, her parents are hiding immigrants in the empty rooms, and she wants to be a writer even though her mother thinks she should concentrate on maths. The owner, Mr. Yao, is a constant threat, and the book's tension comes from the ordinary risk of being noticed.

Yang drew the story from her own childhood of motel work, and the book places the Tangs' situation inside the wider pressure on immigrant families in the period. Mia's answer to nearly everything is to write, and the novel keeps returning to what a child can do with a pen when she has no other power.