The Lost Garden

( 3 )
Pick Up In Store

Pick Up in Store

Reserve and pick up in 60 minutes at your local store

Paperback (1st Beech Tree ed)
$6.29
BN.com price
$6.99 List Price (Save 10%)
Marketplace (New and Used)
from
$0.01
$6.99 List Price (Save 100%)
Usually ships in 1-2 business days
All (24)  
Used (11)  
New (13)  
Close
Sort by
Page 1 of 3
Showing 1 – 10 of 24 (3 pages)
$0.01
(Save 100%)
Better World Books
Seller since 2006

Feedback rating:

(50880)

Condition:

New — never opened or used in original packaging.

Like New — packaging may have been opened. A "Like New" item is suitable to give as a gift.

Very Good — may have minor signs of wear on packaging but item works perfectly and has no damage.

Good — item is in good condition but packaging may have signs of shelf wear/aging or torn packaging. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Acceptable — item is in working order but may show signs of wear such as scratches or torn packaging. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Used — An item that has been opened and may show signs of wear. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Refurbished — A used item that has been renewed or updated and verified to be in proper working condition. Not necessarily completed by the original manufacturer.

Acceptable
Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!

Ships from: Mishawaka, IN

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$0.99
(Save 86%)
Diane Publishing Co. PA
Seller since 2005

Feedback rating:

(202)

Condition: Like New
1996 Paperback Fine Like New Condition. 100% Money Back Guarantee! Ships within 1 business day, includes tracking. Carefully packed. Successful business for 25 Years!

Ships from: Darby, PA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$1.99
(Save 72%)
Wonder Book
Seller since 2008

Feedback rating:

(13615)

Condition: Acceptable
Acceptable condition. Former Library book.

Ships from: Frederick, MD

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$1.99
(Save 72%)
MotorCityBooks
Seller since 2009

Feedback rating:

(5051)

Condition: Like New
Straight spine with no creases. Cover has no damage and pages show little wear. With pride from Motor City. All books guaranteed. Best Service, Best Prices.

Ships from: Brownstown, MI

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$1.99
(Save 72%)
Silver Arch Books
Seller since 2010

Feedback rating:

(1295)

Condition: Acceptable
Ex-Library book - will contain library markings. Selection as wide as the Mississippi.

Ships from: St Louis, MO

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$1.99
(Save 72%)
Free State Books
Seller since 2012

Feedback rating:

(1006)

Condition: Good
Book shows minor use. Cover and Binding have minimal wear, and the pages have only minimal creases. Free State Books. Never settle for less.

Ships from: Halethorpe, MD

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$3.00
(Save 57%)
hookedonbooksadventure MO
Seller since 2007

Feedback rating:

(1039)

Condition: Like New
Trade Paperback FINE Trade Paperback-0688137016 [YEP, LAURENCE] LOST GARDEN.

Ships from: Springfield, MO

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$3.28
(Save 53%)
treebeardbooks
Seller since 2009

Feedback rating:

(207)

Condition: New
1996 Paperback Brand new can ship today from florida ships quickly.

Ships from: West Palm Beach, FL

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Canadian
  • •International
  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$3.45
(Save 51%)
ExpeditedBooksUS
Seller since 2010

Feedback rating:

(887)

Condition: New
Shipped from US. Express shipping in 3 to 6 business days. Standard shipping in 4 to 14 business days. Established seller since 2000

Ships from: Aurora, IL

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
  • •Express, 48 States
  • •Express (AK, HI)
$3.45
(Save 51%)
PaperbackshopUS
Seller since 2009

Feedback rating:

(4793)

Condition: New
Shipped from US in 4 to 14 business days. Established seller since 2000

Ships from: Aurora, IL

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • •Standard, 48 States
  • •Standard (AK, HI)
Page 1 of 3
Showing 1 – 10 of 24 (3 pages)
Close
Sort by

Overview

Young Laurence didn't really where he fit in. He thought of himself as American, especially since he didn't speak Chinese and couldn't understand his grandmother, who lived in Chinatown. But others saw him as different in the conformist American of the 1950s. In this engaging memoir, the two-time Newbery Honor author tells how writing helped him start to solve the puzzle.

The author describes how he grew up as a Chinese American in San Francisco and how he came to use his writing to celebrate his family and his ethnic heritage.

... See more details below
Sending request ...

More About This Book

Overview

Young Laurence didn't really where he fit in. He thought of himself as American, especially since he didn't speak Chinese and couldn't understand his grandmother, who lived in Chinatown. But others saw him as different in the conformist American of the 1950s. In this engaging memoir, the two-time Newbery Honor author tells how writing helped him start to solve the puzzle.

The author describes how he grew up as a Chinese American in San Francisco and how he came to use his writing to celebrate his family and his ethnic heritage.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In this somewhat desultory but affecting autobiography, Yep ( Dragonwings ) describes himself as a collection of disparate puzzle pieces: a Chinese-American raised in a black neighborhood, a child too American to fit into Chinatown and too Chinese to fit in anywhere else. Writing, he explains, has conferred on him the role of puzzle-solver, allowing him imaginatively to join and even reinvent the pieces. Among the most notable figures in Yep's unassuming narrative are his hardworking, indomitable parents, owners of a grocery that requires their unflagging attention, and his Chinatown grandmother, the model for several characters in his novels. Occasional flashes of humor or whimsy--an eccentric chemistry teacher's antics, the revelation that Yep wrote his Mark Twain books to the music of the B-52s--enliven the mix. Ages 11-13. (May)
Children's Literature
When Lawrence Yep was a boy, his parents owned a corner grocery store. In The Lost Garden he describes how his early life revolved around the San Francisco store where he helped his parents who worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. As he traces his growth from childhood to successful author, he explains how growing up Chinese in America, prepared him to write science fiction about alienated people.
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Children's Literature
This is Yep's own story of his childhood in San Francisco. He worked in his family's grocery store and grew up in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. He always felt more American than Chinese. His efforts at coming to terms with his heritage will be instantly recognizable by many of today's youth. His references to family members who appear in disguised form in his other books will make you want to read those again. This is not just a Chinese-American tale; it is a universal story for every age.
School Library Journal
Gr 6-12-- Although this memoir takes readers through Yep's college years, the focus is clearly on his childhood. Born and raised in San Francisco, he gives a vivid account of life in that city in the '50s and '60s and his own quest for personal identity. Raised largely in the mainstream culture, yet influenced also by his Chinese heritage, Yep's piecing together of his own puzzle provides fascinating insights into the whole American mosaic. Readers of his novels will be intrigued by references to their gestation and what people and episodes from life were transformed into now classic fiction. Whether musing on his inventive parents; growing up Asian in a black, Hispanic, and white neighborhood; or enduring the drudgery in the family store, Yep always offers something of value for readers to enjoy and mull over. Family photographs add to the immediacy and illustrate the text to a greater degree than in most biographies. The writing is warm, wry, and humorous right--to the dryly droll colophon. The Last Garden will be welcomed as a literary autobiography for children and, more, a thoughtful probing into what it means to be an American.-- John Philbrook, San Francisco Public Library

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780688137014
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 9/28/1996
  • Edition description: 1st Beech Tree ed
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 144
  • Sales rank: 294,954
  • Age range: 11 - 14 Years
  • Lexile: 1110L (what's this?)
  • Product dimensions: 5.25 (w) x 7.62 (h) x 0.28 (d)

Meet the Author

Laurence Yep is the acclaimed author of more than sixty books for young people and a winner of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award. His illustrious list of novels includes the Newbery Honor Books Dragonwings and Dragon's Gate; The Earth Dragon Awakes: The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, a Texas Bluebonnet Award nominee; and The Dragon's Child: A Story of Angel Island, which he cowrote with his niece, Dr. Kathleen S. Yep, and was named a New York Public Library's "One Hundred Titles for Reading and Sharing" and a Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book.

Mr. Yep grew up in San Francisco, where he was born. He attended Marquette University, graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and received his PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He lives in Pacific Grove, California, with his wife, the writer Joanne Ryder.

Read an Excerpt

The
Pearl
Apartments

Years Ago I wrote a book called Child of the Owl. It was about a little girl, Casey Young, who had grown up outside of San Francisco. When something happened to her father, she had to move into Chinatown to live with her grandmother. For the first time in her life, she had to think of herself as Chinese.

The title was symbolic of her situation -- and of mine and of most Chinese Americans. In Western folklore, owls are usually wise animals. In Chinese folklore, on the other hand, owls are nasty animals. They are disrespectful to their parents and will even kick them out of the nest.

For the same act -- such as reading comic books -- Casey can feel just as wise as a Western owl and just as disrespectful as a Chinese one. In the late sixties, when I wore my hair long like many other college students, I knew my own grandmother, Marie Lee, would have liked me to cut it short. Again, like so many other students at the time, I wasn't about to give in to convention.

To do my grandmother credit, she did not scold me or throw a tantrum the way many other grandmothers might have. Her solution was unique like much of what she did. As I sat talking with her in her little studio apartment, she would reach over abruptly and unannounced to brush the hair out of my eyes as a hint that it was time to visit the barber. I would try my best to ignore the gesture and go on talking.

I knew that she accepted her strange, American-born grandson -- far better than I accepted my China-born grandmother. In many ways, she came to embody what I came to considermy "Chineseness" -- that foreign, unassimilable, independent core. Going into Chinatown once a week made me learn about a part of myself that I sometimes wanted to ignore. For a while, she even lived with us while she was recuperating from an operation on her eyes so that for a short time I had to think about my "Chineseness" each day.

Like Casey, I grew up outside of Chinatown. At the end of World War II, my father had bought a small corner grocery and moved into an apartment above the store.

It was an older building so that it even came with a name: the Pearl Apartments. Officially, the Pearl Apartments sat at 1205 Pierce Street. The neighborhood was mixed -- not only in people but in architectural styles. The houses were all different -- Victorians and stucco postwar houses squatting side by side. However, the Pearl Apartments had their own colorful history. Initially the building had consisted of the store and two sets of apartments. But a second building of three apartments had been jacked up from another location and slowly and painfully brought to the corner where it was joined to the first building by a set of stairs.*

*When it was finally torn down to make room for the garage, it took two wrecking balls because it had been so sturdily built.

It wasn't a Victorian; but it pretended to be. The bay windows had panes of glass that curved outward -- which were always a nuisance for my father to replace when I broke one of them. There was ornate molding on the walls that was great for catching dust; and chandeliers -- cheap ones -- hung from the ceiling by long chains through which the electric cord wound, its old insulation looking as fuzzy as a stretched-out caterpillar. I always thought of chandeliers as the corpses of fat spiders, their legs kicking up from their round, upturned bodies. They were great earthquake indicators, swaying whenever a tremor hit. However, they were handiest at New Year's because you could throw serpentines, coiled ribbons of paper, over them until there seemed to be a small tree of softly colored ribbons winding upward from the center of the living room floor.

The apartments each had certain features that had been modern once but were now old-fashioned. In the hallway was a little shelf and niche for the old type of phone -- the kind that stands up like a candlestick -- and each living room had a Murphy bed.

A Murphy bed swung up inside a closet on powerful springs. When the bed was up, it looked like a closet door. In our own apartment, my father had removed the Murphy bed, building instead a homemade captain's bed with drawers that pulled out underneath. The sides curved and over the edge he had put a strip of metal; and it is to that bed I often return in my dreams though I am sleeping some place far different now.

After scrimping and saving, my parents bought the Pearl Apartments, and my father decided to make some small improvements in the other residences. When my father was taking out the Murphy bed from the upstairs unit, one of the springs uncoiled and the sharp tip pierced his cheek. My father combined a steelworker's toughness with the impishness of a small boy, so until the wound healed, he liked to shock people by drinking some water and letting it dribble through the hole in his cheek.

The one drawback to the Pearl Apartments was that there was no heating of any kind. My parents heated one end of the apartment by leaving the door down on the gas stove. The living room fireplace had to warm the other half; and one of my chores as a child was chopping up the old wooden fruit crates to use as firewood.

Often, I would lie there in the bed my father had made, snuggled under the many quilts for warmth, watching the shadows of the chandelier dance back and forth over the high, ceiling as I slowly fell asleep.

The Lost Garden. Copyright © by Laurence Yep. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3
( 3 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(0)

4 Star

(2)

3 Star

(0)

2 Star

(0)

1 Star

(1)

Your Rating:

Review Guidelines
Add Recommendations
Your Name: Create a Pen Name or Leave Anonymously

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

  • - HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
  • - Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
  • - Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
  • - Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
  • - Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
  • - Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
  • - Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

  • - By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
  • - Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
  • - See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.
Search for Products You'd Like to Recommend

Recommend other products that relate to your review. Just search for them below and share!

Create a Pen Name

Your Pen Name is your unique identiy on BN.com. It will appear on the reviews you write and other website activities. Your Pen Name cannot be edited, changed or deleted once submitted.

Your Pen Name can be any combination of alphanumeric characters (plus - and _), and must be at least two characters long.

Continue Anonymously

We're sorry, but penname is already taken.

Please select one of the following:
Your Pen Name can be any combination of alphanumeric characters (plus - and _), and must be at least two characters long.

Continue Anonymously

penname is available!

By visiting the BN.com website or marking a purchase on BN.com, a User is deemed to have accepted the Terms of Use.

Continue Anonymously

Welcome, penname

You have successfully created your Pen Name. Start enjoying the benefits of the BN.com Community today.

Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews

  • Posted January 19, 2011

    Recommend

    My son (5th grader) read this book for his English class and found it to be an easy read. He is also from similar back ground - being raised in the US feeling American but also having a father from Chile. His grandmother from his father's side doesn't speak any English and my sons Spanish helps them understand one another but not 100%. He felt a connection with the author and I enjoyed reading the book after him to get an extra feel for the story. I loved the analogy to a seed and memories at the end of the book.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 12, 2002

    Review by 5th Grade Boy

    I think it was a good book. Most people would enjoy it. It's about the author growing up in a place outside of Chinatown and felt unaccepted by both the Chinese people and the other American groups. The author's family life and culture was very different from what I am used to. Some of the differences were interesting to learn about. Some of the vocabulary might be difficult for elementary school students. This book might be interesting to people of all ages.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted November 15, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews
If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble
Why is this product inappropriate?
Comments (optional)
500 character limit