Events › Club Book: "The Return of Ellie Black" - a conversation with author Emiko Jean

Emiko Jean is an accomplished young adult writer, best known for the New York Times bestselling Tokyo Ever After and its sequel Tokyo Dreaming. Described as The Princess Diaries for a new generation, Jean’s series follows Japanese-American teenager Izumi Tanaka, a self-professed outsider who discovers that her long-absent father is the Crown Prince of Japan. Reese Witherspoon selected Tokyo Ever After as a Reese’s Book Club pick in 2021. Jean’s adult debut, Mika in Real Life, centers around a directionless, down-on-her-luck woman who is unexpectedly contacted by the daughter she gave up for adoption. Marie Claire calls it “a truly poignant coming-of-age story that deals with race, adoption, and bodily autonomy.” Mika in Real Life was a Good Morning America Book Club selection in August 2022. Jean’s follow-up is a psychological thriller, The Return of Ellie Black. Detective Chelsey Calhoun is often tasked with finding missing girls but is thunderstruck when young Ellie turns up mysteriously in the woods – a full two years after her sudden disappearance.

Hosted in partnership with Club Book, a program of the Metropolitan Library Service Agency (MELSA) and is coordinated by Library Strategies, the nonprofit consulting group of The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library. The program is made possible through Minnesota’s Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund.Club Book is a unique player on the Minnesota literary events scene. They collaborate with all eight library systems in the seven-county region to pair bestselling and award-winning authors with audiences in all corners of the Twin Cities metro.