DREAMT I FOUND YOU, lovely, evocative title indeed

DREAMT I FOUND YOU
JIMIN HAN
Little Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the critically acclaimed author of The Apology, a contemporary retelling of Korea’s Romeo & Juliet, in which the cousin of the star-crossed lovers helps them avoid a tragic fate.

When Dahee Shin was nine years old, she made a promise to protect her favorite cousin, Channing, who has always been like a sister to her. Now, at thirty, Dahee has found herself in a Korean American community in a New England beach town, once more running to the rescue of her debt-ridden relative.

Ever the idealist, Channing—who has spent her life haunted by the tragic story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, Korea’s parallel Romeo & Juliet—has fallen in love with Minjae Oh, all the while fending off the advances of powerful, manipulative Kent Cho, a local politician. As Channing and Minjae’s romance blossoms, and as Kent's suspicion and obsession grow, Dahee begins to realize that it may be up to her to make sure her cousin and beloved escape Chunhyang and Mongryong’s doomed end.

For fans of Hello Beautiful, Dreamt I Found You is a wondrous, tender retelling of Korea's most classic love story, steeped in the travails of a rigid class system, the power of premonition, and shot through with Korean folklore and magic.

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

My Review: A double shot of romantic emotional caffeine. The story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, then the modern-day Korean diaspora story that evokes it, all juxtaposed with subtlety against the bog-standard Murrikin's understanding of Romeo & Juliet and set on the New England coast.

All of this is just fine, sure I'll read it no problem; what made me want to tell y'all about it, is that I saw more parallels to Shakespeare in Love than to Romeo & Juliet. I myownself found that *more* appealing not less so. I know I'll get body-checked into the glass (I need to stop reheating Heated Rivalry) for saying this, but stop telling me I must love Shakespeare's foreign-language drama with its now-stock characters for the depth of his insight. That depth has been added over the course of almost half a millennium of studying analyzing and commenting on the source text! We "know" it's there because so so many people have already "found" it and told us about it. It's now cultural shorthand in Anglophone cultures (possibly others but I have no direct access to those). "It's the Korean Romeo & Juliet" is not an analysis, it's an emotional appeal to the Anglophone reader's cultural furniture.

Author Han has very cannily gotten us Anglophones to do the hard work of buying in to her story in one fell swoop with this (apt, it seems to me) evocation of the very slightly older (c. 1591 versus c. 1694) iteration of the eternal star-crossed lovers story. I was primed by the clearly stated link between this modern-day version and its historical antecedents. I got the expected frisson from the love-conquers-all story, spiced up by the deeply satisfying comeuppance of a crappy human being. Beats there a heart so cold as to not race just a little when the lovers defeat a rotten, jealous monster?

I think not, at least not outside the ranks of the aromantic.

It's the beating heart of the story told here, that tension between what we're expecting, what we know, and what's happening on the page. While Minjae and Channing and Dahee and Kent do their literary gavotte with all its showy back-and-forths, its little hops and leg-pointings, and its apparently endless—at times feeling relentless—repetitions of the same movements to no internal resolution, the external story outline we've applied from long, long cultural familiarity serves as the musical accompaniment that grants us the readers as well as them the characters a stopping place.

I did say stopping place, not ending. The thing about a gavotte is that it's a folk dance all dressed up for aristocratic slumming, so it never develops beyond stylish-looking moves that show the dancers' stamina more than their grace. In Dreamt I Found You the characters are set a task...fall in love, overcome an obstacle, help or obstruct these actions...and repeat that task against a variations-on-a-theme backdrop. It's a time-tested technique that keeps on working because the specifics are fungible as a result of the audience's investment being all but assured. It requires little character development. All that is handled by the evocative models folloed, the stpes of the dance known to most all of us.

The "music" that provides the pace in Dreamt I Found You is the US culture on display. It must be said that culture is not shown to great advantage, but it also isn't deeply explored by the characters' interactions. They all execute the steps, do the hops, make the gestures; nothing derails their actions. The jolts and surprises are few because they're built into both model storys' bones and are well known to us. It doesn't really feel surprising, the biggest tension is will this be Shakespeare's tragedy or Korea's re/union?

Reading it to find out is the pleasure of discovery on offer. I resonated to the story, I liked the author's choice of which model to emulate, and at the end of the dance I bowed to my book-shaped partner and led him off the dance floor admiring how handsomely he had done the dance with me.

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.

SHELTER, my General Fiction vote for the Goodreads Choice Awards

SHELTER
JUNG YUN
Picador
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Kyung Cho is a young father burdened by a house he can’t afford. For years, he and his wife, Gillian, have lived beyond their means. Now their debts and bad decisions are catching up with them, and Kyung is anxious for his family’s future.

A few miles away, his parents, Jin and Mae, live in the town’s most exclusive neighborhood, surrounded by the material comforts that Kyung desires for his wife and son. Growing up, they gave him every possible advantage—private tutors, expensive hobbies—but they never showed him kindness. Kyung can hardly bear to see them now, much less ask for their help. Yet when an act of violence leaves Jin and Mae unable to live on their own, the dynamic suddenly changes, and he’s compelled to take them in. For the first time in years, the Chos find themselves living under the same roof. Tensions quickly mount as Kyung’s proximity to his parents forces old feelings of guilt and anger to the surface, along with a terrible and persistent question: how can he ever be a good husband, father, and son when he never knew affection as a child?

My Review: I voted for this in the 2016 Goodreads choice awards because it was the most interesting novel I'd read among the choices. It wasn't an easy read. I disliked everyone except Ethan Cho, the four-year-old, and given time I'm sure I'd've disliked him too.

What price family? I didn't have a close or happy family. My own parents weren't like the Chos, they were chaotic rather than cruel and cold. But what made the book interesting for me is the way Kyung tries to stop the vicious cycle of chill and distance, and fails again and again. His wife is just as guilty of emotional dysfunction as he is.

When this screwed-up couple is, in simple human decency, required to house the traumatized parents after their luxurious and hollow world cracks wide open, the fun truly begins. Think the set-up's dark? Wait until the parents move in!

The ending is a raggedy-looking bow tied on the fanny of the story which I didn't for one second believe came from any strand in the story itself. I'd still suggest reading it.