Excerpt from Swimming Back to Trout River by Linda Rui Feng , plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"There's a letter from your dad and mom today," Grandpa looked up to say. He hadn't waited for Junie to ride with him to the market this morning.

Over the past five years, these letters came to Trout River in envelopes bearing stamps of foreign men with large foreheads. Junie read these letters out loud with her grandparents, but their content perplexed her. (Momo's doctoral stipend got renewed; Cassia just arrived in San Francisco.) They were splices and pieces, with their connective threads missing.

Today when they cut open the envelope just before lunch, they found that inside, Momo included a separate sheet of paper addressed "Dear Junie," the first time she had been singled out this way:

I promise you that we will be reunited here by your twelfth birthday—just a year and a half away! Turning twelve is a milestone in a person's life, and we will celebrate it all together.

For emphasis, he'd put dots under the two characters for the word "promise," as if this had been a request on her part that he was granting.

Reunited—there? Junie looked up from the letter and sought the eyes of her grandparents, but their faces portrayed neither surprise nor confusion.

"They mean for me to visit, right?" Junie said. "Not to live with them there?"

There was a pause before Grandma answered: "Your mom and dad want to raise you themselves."

The sound of the cicadas outside rose in volume and seemed to drift into a minor key.

"But why can't I live here with you? Momo grew up here."

A look passed between her grandparents. "Someday Grandpa and I will get old, you see, and won't be able to take care of you."

It was as if the world was going off-kilter, rearranging itself around her, without her. Junie had never thought that at some point in the future, she would sit down with her grandparents around this table for the last time.

"Then I will take care of both of you," she said, "when you get old."

Grandma began shaking her head as if she'd come to the limit of her explanatory powers, but she really hadn't explained anything at all, Junie thought. They were asking her to submit to an order of things that she could not uphold as real.

Her grandparents cleared the table and put the leftover food under a mesh dome to keep the flies away. It was now that time of day when villagers young and old took noonday naps in any position and on any convenient surface available—tables, benches, chairs. Junie and her grandparents lay down on the bamboo mat on the concrete floor together. But Junie lay awake with a tightening feeling in her chest, like a knot that was drawing taut but was also trying to explode too.

The about-to-explode knot said: There's a world out there trying to lay claim on you. What are you going to do about it?

She waited until she heard her grandparents snoring beside her, then rose from the mat, and scooted quickly on her knees to reach her wooden horse. She knew she didn't have a lot of time. She propelled herself out the door as quietly as she could. She bounced softly down the steps into the courtyard.

One. Two. Three.

When Grandpa woke up and saw Junie missing, the first thing he did was rush to the well. He leaned into its opening and looked. Once he was certain there was nothing in the water, he gripped the rim of the well tightly with both hands, and rested like that for a moment with his eyes closed.

He hopped on his bicycle and headed toward the fields. Pedaling his bicycle as if gravity was an on-again, off-again thing, Grandpa called out every fifty meters.

Junie! Junie?

The rattle of the metal chains from his bicycle traveled up the dirt road that separated them. In between came the white noise of the rustling trees and the minor key of the cicadas.

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