Ties that bind, ties that break

Ties That Bind, Ties That Break

Author: Lensey Namioka 

Date of publication: November 14th 2000

Editorial house: Laurel Leaf

Pages: 160 

About the author 

Namioka was born in Beijing, the daughter of linguist Yuenren Chao and physician Buwei Yang Chao. The family moved often in China. In 1937, the Chaos were living in Nanjing, and fled westward in the face of the Japanese Invasion. They eventually made their way to Hawaii, then Cambridge, Massachusetts. Namioka attended grade school in Cambridge and excelled at mathematics. When she moved to the United States from China at age nine, she knew no English at first. Math seemed easier than other school subjects because it used the same numerals in China.  

Namioka attended University of California, Berkeley, where her father was a professor of Asian Studies. Here she met and married Isaac Namioka, a fellow graduate student in mathematics. The Namiokas moved to Ithaca, New York, where Isaac Namioka taught at Cornell University, and Lensey Namioka taught at Wells College. But in time she turned back to what she had loved doing as a child: writing adventure stories.

Lensey Namioka's first love is reading and writing adventure stories. As a child in China, she read Chinese martial arts novels, Sherlock Holmes stories, and The Three Musketeers. When she was eight, she wrote her first book on pieces of scrap paper that she sewed together with thread. It was about a woman warrior called the "Princess with a Bamboo Sword." As an adult, her first published stories were about the adventures of two samurai (warriors) in sixteenth-century Japan.

Namioka has won many awards for her work. For instance, Ties That Bind, Ties That Break was named one of the American Library Association's 10 Best Books for Young People, and also won the California Young Reader Medal and the Washington State Governor's Writers Award.

Sources: 

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/26612.Lensey_Namioka
https://www.eduplace.com/kids/tnc/mtai/namioka.html
https://www.learner.org/workshops/tml/workshop1/authors6.html