His new wife wants to be Yuki's friend, but essentially, Yuki misses her mother and the loving relationship they had, and she is very unhappy. Her mother is portrayed as loving but weak and fragile, while her father and stepmother worry more about what other people will think than they do about Yuki. They also do not let her visit her mother's family as often as she would like, and that bothers her. Essentially, she grows up without love after her mother dies, and she has to come to terms not only with losing her mother but also with her own maturity and dreams for the future.

Two of these protagonists are immigrants, and they are all caught between two different worlds. How they react and how they manage to combine their cultures is the central point of all these books. Their families all hang on to their home culture,...
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