Yolk

Review by Booklist Review

In her third novel, Choi (Permanent Record, 2019) pushes the boundaries of young adult fiction. Ji-young Baek, or Jayne, is a fashion marketing student at a Manhattan design college when her overachieving older sister, June, tracks her down to tell her that she has cancer. The sisters' relationship has been one of intense conflict since high school, but now the cancer brings them into an awkward closeness, forcing them outside their selfish bubbles as they unite in hiding June's illness from their overly critical mother back in Texas. But June is not the only one who is sick. Jayne's mental health issues present as a self-destructive chaos of binge drinking, bulimia, and sex with boys who are bad to her. Fortunately, she reconnects with an old crush, Patrick, a fellow child of Korean immigrants who offers much-needed tenderness and understanding. Choi's trademark witty prose and wonderfully authentic immersion in contemporary New York City lighten the intimate details that can make the sisters' darker experiences disturbing to read. Thankfully, the novel ends on a note of hope and healing.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this reflective, deliberately paced novel told from a younger sibling's point of view, Choi (Permanent Record) examines the relationship between two Korean American sisters. Ambitious older sister June and impulsive Jayne had a love-hate relationship throughout their Texas childhood, and though they both now live in New York City, they've become fully estranged. June is a corporate success, working in hedge funds, while Jayne attends fashion design school and struggles to make it to class. The silence between the two ends, however, when June reveals that she has cancer. For the first time, Jayne, always protected by her older sibling, plays the supportive role, cooking and cleaning June's posh Manhattan apartment. Insightful and intricately constructed, Choi's novel provides a tender look at the sisters' layered bond while addressing aspects of Jayne's experience, including sibling resentment, anxious efforts to navigate relationships, and a long-term eating disorder. If the story takes its time unfolding amid running social commentary, the result is an appreciably personal-feeling narrative about cultural identity, mental and physical health, and siblinghood's complications. Ages 14--up. Agent: Edward Orloff, McCormick Literary. (Mar.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 9 Up--Jayne Baek's carefully curated identity as a young college student studying fashion marketing in New York City begins to crack when her older sister, June (who also lives in the city and from whom she's estranged), shares her cancer diagnosis. The siblings are accustomed to keeping secrets--Jayne lives in a squalorous illegal sublet with a manipulative ex-boyfriend while June is dealing with serious work issues at her hedge fund job--but despite their emotional distance, they remain steadfastly committed to each other. This loyalty is largely due to June's role as a maternal stand-in for Jayne during their childhood when their Korean immigrant parents worked 16-hour days in their family restaurant in San Antonio, TX, as well as later in their teens when their mother inexplicably disappeared only to return weeks later with no explanation. Readers see Jayne's initially superficial musings on style and culture give way to a layered narrative that progressively gains depth. This novel is messy and honest with its nuanced cultural portrayals; Choi makes it clear that people of Korean descent in America are not a monolith. Choi also portrays Jayne's complex struggle with disordered eating with rawness and sensitivity. The evenly paced storytelling is winning and cinematic, particularly with respect to Jayne's developing relationship with childhood friend Patrick. Here, Choi masterfully depicts burgeoning sexuality and the politics of consent with incredible tenderness. VERDICT Readers of color, particularly those with immigrant and first-generation heritages, will strongly relate to themes centering intergenerational dependence and trauma, as well as the complicated experience of navigating multiple cultures. A must-have for teen and new adult collections.--Lalitha Nataraj, California State Univ., San Marcos

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A young woman struggles with body image, sexuality, identity issues, and her place in the world. College student Jayne Baek majors in marketing at an unnamed New York City fashion school and strives to belong to in-crowds even as her first-person narrative voice delivers searing appraisals of artifice and curated personae contrived to attract attention and adoration. Jayne's perfectionist streak combines with her hunger for acceptance and affirmation, feeding into obsessive, compulsive--and ultimately self-destructive--behaviors, including hookups and rituals of bulimia, all providing only the illusion of control. Accustomed to an heir-and-spare dynamic with her elder sister, June, who got a full scholarship to Columbia and a hedge fund job, Jayne's existential insecurity crystallizes upon learning the shocking news that June has cancer. Jayne's fancily attired therapist emphasizes co-pays before referring her to a support group, with the advice that people--not places--will make Jayne feel at home, offering the opportunity for nuanced commentary. Reconnecting with Patrick Jang, an acquaintance from her San Antonio, Texas, childhood who is also of Korean descent, becomes an emotional salve and anchoring influence for Jayne, especially as mutual consent is sought at every stage of their intimacy. Portraying intergenerational immigrant experiences with a Korean cultural focus, this poignant story underscores self-sacrifices that prove to be life-sustaining in the name of sisterly love. Intense, raw, textured. (Fiction. 14-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

Chapter 1 chapter 1 Depending on where I focus and how much pressure I apply to the back of my throat, I can just about blot him out. Him being Jeremy. Him who never shuts up. Him being my ex. He whose arm is clamped around the back of the café chair that belongs to another girl. She's startlingly pretty, this one. Translucent and thin. Achingly so. She has shimmering lavender hair and wide-set, vacant eyes. Her name is Rae and when she offers her cold, large hand, I instinctively search her face for any hint of cosmetic surgery. Her lids, her lips, the tip of her nose. Her boots are Ann Demeulemeester, the ones with hundreds of yards of lace, and her ragged men's jacket, Comme. "I like your boots," I tell her, needing her to know that I know, and immediately hating myself for it. I'm so intimidated I could choke. She smiles with such indulgent kindness I feel worse. She's not at all threatened by me. "I got them here," she tells me in faultless English. I don't ask her where there might be. Jeremy says I'm obsessed with other women. He might be right. Then again, someone once described Jeremy's energy to me as human cocaine, and they were definitely right. "Mortifying." He shudders, blotting his slick mouth with a black cloth napkin. Jeremy's the only one eating a full-on meal here at Léon. A lunch of coq au vin. I draw in a deep breath of caramelized onion. All earthy, singed sugar. "Can you imagine failing at New York so publicly that you have to 'move home'?" He does twitchy little scare quotes around the last bit. He does this without acknowledging that for him, moving home would be a few stops upstate on Metro-North, to a town called Tuxedo. A fact he glosses over when he calls himself a native New Yorker. I watch Rae, with a small scowl nestled above her nose, purposely apply a filter on her Instagram Story. It's her empty espresso cup at an angle. I lean back in my wicker café chair and resume lurking her profile, which I can do in plain sight because I have a privacy shield. It's the typical, enigmatic hot-girl dross on her main feed, scones cut out onto a marble surface dusted with flour, her in a party dress in a field. A photo of her taking a photo in a mirror with a film camera. In an image farther down, Rae is wearing a white blouse and a black cap and gown. Grinning. It's a whole different energy. When I arrive at the caption, I close my eyes. I need a moment. I somehow sense the words before they fully register. She graduated from Oxford. It's crushing that most of the caption is in Korean. She's like me but so much better. My will to live leeches out of my skin and disappears into the atmosphere. I should be in class. I once calculated it, and a Monday, Wednesday, Friday course costs forty-seven dollars, not counting rent. Counting rent in this city, it's exactly one zillion. "Yeah, hi." Jeremy flags down a passing server. A curvy woman with a tight Afro turns to us, arms laden with a full tray of food. "Yeah, can you get me a clean glass of water?" He holds his smeared glass to the light. "I can," she says through her teeth, crinkling her eyes and nodding in a way that suggests she's garroting him in her mind. "That's not our server," I whisper when she leaves. As a restaurant kid, albeit a pan-Asian strip-mall operation that charges a quarter for to-go boxes, I cringe with my whole body. Jeremy shrugs. I check myself out in the strip of antique mirror behind Rae's and Jeremy's heads. I swear my face is wider now than it was this morning. And the waistband of my mom jeans digs into my gut flesh, stanching circulation in my lower belly and thighs. I can feel my heartbeat in my camel-toe. It's a dull pain. A solid distraction from this experience. I wonder if they were talking about me before I arrived. I eye the communal french fries. Saliva pools in the back of my gums. Ketchup is my kryptonite. Especially swirled with ranch dressing, which I've trained myself to give up. The Raes of the world would never. Or they would and it would be quirky and wholesome. Her leg is the circumference of my arm. I smile at the room in a way I imagine would appear breezy yet bored in a film about heartbreak. I love this place. You'd never guess that a dumpy French restaurant from the seventies would be the new hotspot, but that's the other thing Jeremy's good for: knowing the migratory practices of various clout monsters. That and ignoring the tourists as he sweet-talks Oni the hostess into ushering us past the busy bar and into the seats in the way, way back. Someday I'm going to eat a meal in a New York restaurant by myself without burning with shame. "I have to get this dog, right?" interrupts Rae, lifting a fry to her mouth. When she chews, a pad of muscle pulses at her temples. She leans into me and shows me a Pomeranian puppy. "I want a rescue, but look at him." She strokes the photo with her thumb. "I don't know if I can wait." I glance at Jeremy, who's paused with his fork raised to his mouth. "What time is our thing?" he asks her. "What thing?" It's out before I can think. Rae's eyes flit to Jeremy's and skitter back to me. They let my question hang in the air like a smell. "Oh, don't worry," I recover, smiling stiffly. "I have plans." "No, come!" exclaims Rae, squeezing my forearm for emphasis. "God, I'm so awkward." She laughs at herself ruefully. "It's just an intimate gathering at a dear friend's home. It's a safe space, so I have to make sure it's okay." Her eyes narrow meaningfully, placing an open palm on my leg. "But if it's a no, I hope you can respect that it's nothing personal." "Honestly," I tell her, convinced that all her friends are sylphlike and terrifying. "I have to leave right after this." Jeremy pushes his plate away. I hand him my water before having to be asked. His eyes dart past me to beetle all around us. Party eyes. Shiny. Hard. Roving for people to say hello to. I get it. I love New York precisely for this reason. The culture. The vibration. The relevance. The crackly frisson of opportunity. When we first met, it was this gleaming, hungry aspect of him that I liked best. His magnetism was contagious, especially when he motormouthed at you about his grand plans. You felt like you were on his team. He pulls his sunglasses out and cleans them with my napkin. Not so long ago he was beautiful to me. Partly because he's tall. Not even New York tall but objectively tall. Over six feet. But it was his ambition that drew me to him. I'd never met anyone who could talk at that pace. It was astonishing. But now, I can see him how others might. His straw-blond hair and skin tone blend his features together in a vague soup, blurring an already uncertain chin. But then he'll say something so quintessentially, winsomely New York that I'm scared to let him go. And he knows everyone. From models to door guys. Once we ordered weed to the house and it turned out he played basketball with the delivery dude. When they gave each other a pound, I was so envy-struck I could barely speak. It doesn't help that on the rare occasion Jeremy introduces me to his friends--their eyes glaze over in disinterest. Jeremy calls himself a poet. And a performance artist. But, for him, neither of these things particularly mean anything, and combined they mean even less. Mostly he focuses his efforts on a literary magazine that I've designed pages for but never seen in real life. In short, he's a bartender at Clandestino over on East Broadway. I try not to think about how much money he owes me. And how we shared a bed for months and then stopped. The only time I don't hate him is when I think he's mad at me. "I'd rather die than go home," I say to no one in particular. Excerpted from Yolk by Mary H. K. Choi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---