Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible

Anna and the French Kiss meets Stoner & Spaz in a contemporary young adult coming-of-age novel about a girl, her struggles, and her art.

Aiko Cassidy is fourteen and lives with her sculptor mother in a small Midwestern town. For most of her young life Aiko, who has cerebral palsy, has been her mother's muse. But now, she no longer wants to pose for the sculptures that have made her mother famous. Aiko works hard on her own dream of becoming a great manga artist with a secret identity. When Aiko's mother invites her to Paris for a major exhibition of her work, Aiko at first resists. She'd much rather go to Japan, Manga Capital of the World, where she might be able to finally meet her father, the indigo farmer. When she gets to France, however, a hot waiter with a passion for manga and an interest in Aiko makes her wonder if being invisible is such a great thing after all.
Gadget Girl began as a novella published in Cicada. The story won the SCBWI Magazine Merit Award in Fiction and was included in an anthology of the best stories published in Cicada over the past ten years.

Suzanne Kamata is the author of the novel Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press, 2008), a short story collection, The Beautiful One Has ComeLove You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press, May 2008). Her short stories and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times. Kamata is a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest and has been awarded an SCBWI Multicultural Work-in-Progress grant for her forthcoming book, Indigo Girl..
Her fiction for young adults also appears in Hunger Mountain and Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction - An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories (Stone Bridge Press, March 2012) edited by Holly Thompson.