Pippa Park Raises Her Game

Written by Erin Yun

Narrated by Jennifer Sun Bell

Listeners will cheer on Pippa Park in this wonderful middle school book about friendships, bullying, crushes, and family. In this relatable story, Pippa reinvents herself and discovers who she really is on and off the basketball court.



Life is full of great expectations for Korean-American Pippa Park. It seems like everyone, from her family to the other kids at school, has a plan for how her life should look.



When Pippa gets a mysterious basketball scholarship to Lakeview Private, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself. At school, Pippa juggles old and new friends, a crush, and the pressure to get As and score points while keeping her past and family's laundromat a secret from her elite new classmates.



But when Pippa begins to receive a string of hateful, anonymous messages via social media, her carefully built persona is threatened. As things spiral out of control, Pippa wonders if she can keep her old and new lives separate, or if she should even try.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666180084

Erin Yun

Erin Yun is the author of the bestselling AAPI middle-grade series Pippa Park, which includes two titles: Pippa Park Raises Her Game (Book 1) and Pippa Park Crush at First Sight (Book 2). She received her BA in English from New York University and her Masters in Creative Writing from Cambridge. While at NYU, she served as president of its policy debate team. This experience came in handy when she worked as the debate consultant for the Tony-nominated Best Play on Broadway—What the Constitution Means to Me.  She created the Pippa Park Author Program, an interactive writing workshop that she has conducted both in person and virtually at schools, libraries, and bookstores. Folks can tell she grew up in Texas by how often she says "y’all." And yes—she used to play basketball as a middle grader!  

Reviews for Pippa Park Raises Her Game

[jennybeast · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's probably a good thing I didn't know about the Great Expectations angle until after I started reading -- I have terrible memories of that book from 7th grade -- but this book is clever and Pippa is a great character. I'm a big fan of her loving family (even if they have high expectations) and her solid skill with basketball. Friendship drama, some cyberbullying, some poverty shaming. Mother had to return to Korea, Pippa lives in Western Mass with her sister and husband. Very tween coming of age -- making mistakes, learning and taking responsibility. Really well done.

[sjgirl-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A loose re-telling of Great Expectations, though it’s the original aspects like Pippa’s family where this shone brightest.

There still aren’t that many books that feature female athletes, so it was great to see Pippa participating in this sport she loves, playing basketball with the aggression of a star player yet at the same time being a good teammate.

Since Pippa spends much of the novel pursuing popularity at the expense of friends and family, she makes plenty of choices along the way that will make you cringe, but at the same time, it’s such an identifiable situation, at some point practically everyone has compromised who they are to some degree in an effort to fit in only to regret it later, so you can’t help but feel for Pippa and root for her to see the errors of her ways, to see that despite how others make you feel, there really isn’t any shame in having less money or a different culture.

When it came to the character of Eliot, hewing close to Great Expectations, having him be cold and aloof like Estella, well, it kind of sucked the joy out of experiencing Pippa’s crush alongside her since this boy never ever felt worthy of her admiration, ninety-nine percent of the time he’s rude to her for no reason and I just found myself wishing she would tell him off. Ultimately, I thought Eliot and his family drama didn’t feel all that necessary to telling Pippa’s story, it just kind of seemed like something wedged in to represent that part of Great Expectations, not that it was poorly written, I just felt like I would have rather those pages maybe focused on her friendship with Buddy or something else that was more personal to Pippa than Eliot’s family.

That’s why Pippa’s family scenes were easily my favorites in the book because of how intimate and personal they felt. I loved the dynamics of their family, the sister who has to step in as mom to Pippa, who feels she has to be harder on her than a sister would want to be, the brother-in-law who is the sweetest guy around, I can’t imagine any reader not adoring him, and Pippa, who fights Mina at every turn as kids will do, she is very much their daughter even if it isn’t in the conventional sense. I had such empathy for each of them, for Mina so often having to be the “bad guy,” for Jung forever trying to play peacemaker, and for Pippa, too, who has these painful moments of being ashamed of her family circumstances because the outside world has made her feel that way, there’s something very real about those emotions, their household, in the arguments with the undercurrent of warmth, in comforting with food, in being there for Pippa when she’s messed up and all she expects is their disappointment in her, those are the moments I’ll remember, the reasons I’ll read more from this author.

[hawaiianmermaid701 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved this adaptation of Great Expectations, honestly more than the original. Pippa blends all of the problems, and opportunities both taken and squandered by the original Pip and makes a much more likeable and relatable character. I would.rwcommend this book to anyone interested (or not) in GE and see what they think.

An aspect I especially loved was the #ownvoices rep from the author about Korean culture. I have already passed this book along to a friend that is taking part in the Asian Readathon in May 2020

[foggidawn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When Pippa Park receives an unexpected scholarship to a private school, she decides to keep her public school past a secret in order to fit in better with the popular girls. As one might expect, this complicates matters.

We all have specific plot devices that particularly appeal to us, and ones that get on our nerves. A friend of mine hates the familiar trope of middle schoolers who develop new interests and lose friendships because of it. Me, I'm not a big fan of the "living a lie" scenario, where a character needlessly complicates her life by pretending to be someone she's not, or by obscuring certain key facts about her history or personality, as Pippa does. Nevertheless, I thought this book was well-written an interesting, with great characters and lots of interesting #ownvoices detail about Korean American culture. For young readers who enjoy contemporary narratives, I would certainly recommend this.

[sweetiegherkin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Seventh-grader Pippa Park already has a lot on her plate trying to keep up with her guardian sister's high expectations for her; when she gets a scholarship to an elite private school in the rich part of town, Pippa now also wants desperately to seem cool to her new classmates. But fitting in seems to mean making concessions about who she really is. Can Pippa juggle hiding the truth about her working-class family and public school background? Or should she just try and be her true self?

This was an excellent read, worth all the early praise it has received. The book loosely uses the framework of Great Expectations to structure its narrative of a Korean-American girl trying to fit in. I'm not sure if young readers will realize that the book is using elements of Great Expectations (we didn't read that title until high school in my school district), but it won't take away from the book if they are unfamiliar with the Dickens title. However, I do think a fun Easter egg is the cover illustration including a copy of the book in Pippa's locker.

By telling a compelling story and not being didactic at all, this book contains many positive messages about the values of true friendship, hard work, and a loving family. Readers will learn some Korean customs and words as well; again, these are fit neatly into the narrative. The problems presented for Pippa in the book vary in their complexity, but many are relatable to the middle-grade audience, such as school clique dynamics, studying for an important test, playing in the big game, etc. Yun seems to really know her audience and write to them. (I've recently read a few supposedly middle grade books that felt like the authors were still writing for an adult audience. This was refreshingly not an issue here.)

Pippa is a likable character as are many of the other characters; even characters who are less likable are well-written and do not come across as one-note caricatures. The book concludes in a way that ties up the storylines neatly, yet I could see follow-up books working quite nicely as we see more of what Pippa goes through and achieves during her years at Lakeview School.

[oceancat-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Pippa Park Raises her Game is modern middle grade retelling of Great Expectations with a Korean American, basketball playing, middle school girl as the main character. And I loved it! It is a great story in its own right, so even if a reader hasn’t read Great Expectations they should really enjoy it, but it was also so much fun to see the elements pulled from the classic incorporated into this story. Pippa is such a relatable middle schooler, trying to make friends and fit in and ultimately realizing that the best friends are the ones who like you for who you are. I look forward to the authors next book!

[mikedi-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First the negative - The copy I received was not bound properly as I had to almost break the spine as words tended to drift into it. I hope the finished product wasn't that way. That's the only negative. It was a good thing that it was worth the struggle.
Thanks to Fabled Films Press for sending me the ARC of this wonderful book. I much enjoyed the story of Pippa Park and her trying to fit in at a private school. Author Erin Yun has written a marvelous tale of Park's adventures. If there is more Pippa adventures I would surely read them.

I will share this book with my grandchildren but will buy a more readable copy for them.