I LEAVE IT UP TO YOU, do not read while hungry!

I LEAVE IT UP TO YOU
JINWOO CHONG
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?

A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.

Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 AM fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night's pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, that of romantic interest to the male nurse who took care of him throughout, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.

There is value in the joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.

Why do we run from those we love, and why do we still love those who run from us? A highly entertaining and poignant story about second chances and self-discovery, I Leave It Up to You pilots through the loss, love, and absurdity of finding one’s footing after the ground gives way.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Bear starring Daniel Dae Kim, only queer. Like that show, it's about the people doing the work of feeding others not the act of making and serving the food.

The lead is Jack, Junior. He has never been one to deal with anything he can run away from; waking up from a coma to find that his fiancé has moved on with his own life without a proper ending...well...it's a condign punishment. Far more unnerving is having to return home to the family he treated the way his belovèd treated him.

Being Korean, they take him in; being Korean, there's a steep emotional cost to their reintegration of the queer prodigal. Now it's all on Jack's shoulders to do the thing he ran away to escape...run the restaurant that supports them...plus make his amends for the truly terrible, and in their ancestral culture deeply dishonorable, way he abandoned them.

Their homophobia does not excuse him of feeling guilt even in his own mind. He's forced to grapple, belatedly but inescapably, with coming of age and coming out instead of running away from this existential conflict. Delaying this always complex and usually painful process does not make it one bit easier. A raft of new complications are added on top of the old, homophobic ones: what the hell is COVID? Why won't his fiancè talk to him? How can he presume to advise his nephew, son of his recovering-alcoholic brother, on life when he has royally screwed his own? Can he learn to want the legacy of restaurant-running his deeply unhappy father and super-pragmatic mother are so desperate to wish on him? How can he ask Emil, the nurse who cared for him during his coma, to be...to be...well, what exactly does he want Emil to be?

You can see how the layers and the complications bring to mind Carmie and The Bear. It's not like a mystery novel, it's more like an episodic show, in that you're expected from the get-go to invest in the people doing the stuff rather than the stuff being done. I'll always batten on any story that takes a man on the emotional journey of self-discovery, self-actualization. It's much more interesting to me than another facile-but-fun falling in lust/love/like in any order story could be.

I can't quite offer all five stars because the story can't quite offer enough of an ending. Yes, Jack is on a new road through life. He has a sense of himself as in control of more of his life than ever before, and gets that from a very realistic decision to let go of many of his self-limiting beliefs. This is done, however, by implication. No scene illuminates this decision, and that absence...likely done to avoid being smacked in the face with it...means Jack continues to *feel* to readers like his old self but inexplicably making better decisions. Umma, the mother, is short-shrifted as a person...like she would be in the culture she comes from. It felt a bit raggedy of Author Chong to give her a mysterious boyfriend and not do more with it. Chekhov's gun, anyone? And the bigly under-thought-through inclusion of COVID and its impact on the small family businesses of the US. The loving, delightful use of use of evocative description for sushi ingredients, preparation, and its cultural resonances for this Korean family made me wish to see more of this cursory subplot. Describing the food and leaving the business underlying its service out wasn't fully satisfying.

What was satisfying was the manner of Author Chong's incorporation of Jack, JUNIOR'S, queerness. Yes, a point of conflict; no, not a source of rage and rejection. Jack's running away was more of a problem than his sexuality.

I love this story's good parts a lot, I think the author deserves our eyeblinks and treasure. A very good story well-told is a thing we all need.