Name: Emily S's review of Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
Item: Free Food for Millionaires
Rating: 3
Author: Emily S

Min Jin Lee

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST PACHINKO New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceNPR Fresh Air Top Ten Books of the YearUSA Today Top Ten Books of the YearThe Times (London) Top Ten Books of the Year In her critically acclaimed debut, National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee introduces the indelible Casey Han: a strong-willed, Queens-bred daughter of Korean immigrants who is addicted to a glamorous Manhattan lifestyle she cannot afford. Fresh out of Princeton with an economics degree, no job, and a popular white boyfriend, Casey is determined to carve a space for herself in the glittering world she craves-but at what cost? Lee's bestselling, sharp-eyed, sweeping epic of love, greed, and hunger-set in a landscape where millionaires scramble for the free lunches the poor are too proud to accept-is an addictively readable, startlingly sympathetic portrait of intergenerational strife and immigrant struggle, exposing the intricate layers of a community clinging to its old ways in a city packed with haves and have-nots.

Free Food for Millionaires

Iara Figueira

To Casey, it seemed upside down to call a minority person a racist, or a woman a sexist, a poor person a snob, a gay person a homophobe, an old person an ageist, a Jewish person an anti-Semite. All these labels were carelessly bandied about at school. But she admitted that it was possible to hate yourself and easy to hate others because you’d been hated. Hatred had its own logic of symbiosis.

Joseph smiled ruefully at Tina. “The night before I left on the ship, my mother sewed twenty gold rings in the lining of my coat with her own hand. She had these thick rheumatic fingers, and the servant girls usually did the sewing, but. . .” He lifted his right hand in the air as if he could make his mother’s hand appear in place of his own, then clasped the right one with his left. “She wrapped each ring with cotton batting so there’d be no noise when I moved around.” Joseph marveled at his mother’s thoughtfulness, recalling sharply how every time he had to sell a ring, he’d unstitch the white blanket thread that his mother had sewn into the coat fabric with her heavy needle. 

Casey wasn’t indifferent to her father’s pain. But she’d decided she didn’t want to hear about it anymore. His losses weren’t hers, and she didn’t want to hold them. She was in Queens, and it was 1993. But at the table it was 1953, and the Korean War refused to end.

Beatrix

She was a biographer who did not understand her own children's lives. Life was just guesswork even if you were an eyewitness.

Everyone scrounged for an identity defined by objects. 

 Tina offered up her baby-sister smile; it said, Tell me something I need to learn. Let me adore you again

The first time she saw a black sky pierced with what seemed like an infinite number of white holes was on a trip to Newport with her roommate, Virginia, to her grandmother's house during a school vacation. What Casey felt initially was the pause in her own breathing. The sight literally took her breath away. Then she craned her neck to stare at the swirl of the Milky Way, and she could hardly be persuaded to go back into the great house despite the mosquitoes nibbling on her ankles. For the remainder of her visit, the senior Mrs. Craft pronounced Casey "that starry-eyed girl." The next day, when her mosquito bites grew fat and pink on her ankles and toes  -forming their own raised constellation- Casey felt no regret whatsoever. At the age of nineteen, she'd finally seen stars.

She dashed out the door and ran down the flights of stairs, gulping air to calm her wild heart.

Emily S

"Goodbye, Columbus meets the novels of Amy Tan in this American story of class, society and identity that marks the debut of a new voice in fiction"--Provided by the publisher.

Sarah Sammis

There are two good things about Free Food for Millionaires: the title (taken from the free lunches offered to investment bankers) and the cover art. That's about it.

The remaining 500 pages drag through endless chapters of Casey and her acquaintances trying to get on with their lives. Some of the characters grow and learn over time but the main character, Casey, doesn't do a damn thing in this book. She's apparently good at investment banking and good at millinery (free food for milliners?) but terrible at making decisions and even worse at running her own life. Although she has a number of people falling over themselves willing to mentor her, she never sticks with a plan long enough to see it to completion and to get some stability in place. Instead she just burns through her friends, mentors and potential employers like the numerous cigarettes she chain smokes throughout the book.

Without a likeable central character, there is very little motivation to suffer through endless pages of product name dropping, lengthy descriptions, and sex scenes that fail to titillate. When I finished the book (and still nothing had happened by the last page), all I could do was give a sigh of relief to move onto something more interesting.

Kathy Luo

5 stars in acknowledgement of how much of an achievement it was to publish something like this, as a first novel, in 2007. I was more sad than anything 90% of the time I was reading it (I'm all for ambiguous endings, but dayum is anyone in this book allowed to be happy??), but you simply have to respect Min Jin Lee's raw talent and ambition. Ask me in a couple months if I've fully processed this book and I will probably still say "nope!"

Karis Ryu

Parts of this made me so mad and then parts of this just- hit, but now I have finished and that ending tableau is making me tear up. I don't live in Casey's world, and she and I have our differences, particularly concerning worldview and faith, but her rage, her despair, her frustration at her own shortcomings are all things that resonated deeply in me. Reviews have described this book as a contemporary refashioning of the Victorian novel, and I can definitely see where that comes from. The book casts a wide net, but I think Min Jin Lee succeeds in authenticating every personality, every background, every perspective, so that there is no one "Korean American" story, and everyone is allowed to be themselves- in many cases, to figure themselves out. This was graphic and alarming and messy and because of that extremely discomfort-inducing at moments that made me think I could not fully enjoy this book, but the last chapter solidified the glimpses of beauty scattered throughout the novel: it's only when all of the money is taken away and all of the walls are torn down that people can start to rebuild with a simple hope.

Did I want to scream at people through a lot of it yeah. (My first and last impressions of characters could not be more different.) Is this going into my favorites shelf also yes.

charisa

what. a. MESS. this was the dumpster fire to end all dumpster fires. i was stressed out of my mind the entire time i read this, but somehow crammed 600 pages in the span of two days?? apparently the characters with all their vices and tortuous life decisions had me in a chokehold. 

this was incredibly ambitious, and heightened by a sprawling cast of complicated characters, speaks to min jin lee’s immense storytelling craft. there are echoes of pachinko sprinkled throughout — the multigenerational family drama, the discomforts of korean-americanness — but this story bears a special brand of cynicism and desperation that makes it entirely its own. 

i actually didn’t hate casey as much as i expected i would. rather, i pitied her and related to her stubbornness, her tendency to avoid problems when they escalated out of her control. i found her desire for spiritual disciplines sooo fascinating as well, and realistic considering how often guilt and obligation can overshadow and obfuscate true faith. but ugh casey, you’re going about it all wrong!!! someone get this girl the gospel. and possibly also a rewired brain. 

i DO, however, hate ted kim. all my homies hate ted kim.

faye

if there's one word i'd use to describe the writer who is min jin lee: ambitious. a book that -- at several points -- refused to let me get out of bed to find out what happened next. lee explores the ties that bond immigrants and immigrant families, the complexities of children disillusioned by the struggles of their parents, and the discomfort of happiness. lee is unmatched in her ability to describe crazy familial relationships. i will say there were several storylines that didn't feel natural to me (leah) and there were characters that felt lacking (tina), but casey's characterization was brilliant. it got a little telenovela-y at times (so much love n adultery n romance n affairs that felt superfluous), but free food for millionaires is a book i will remember -- especially the first scene between the han family

This book was exceptionally well written. It is not something I would normally read and it’s not something I will ever read again. The book in its entirety had a bittersweet taste on every word. I don’t know how to describe a book that was so wonderful that I hated it. I don’t know how to make that make sense. 

Shai

Sarai Johnson

I enjoyed this very much. It is immersive and fun. It does meander quite a bit but I didn’t mind. The third person omniscient is unusual but enjoyable to me. I cared about each and every character. I don’t give five stars only because the meaning of it isn’t coherent and the ending didn’t feel like an ending. Perhaps novels don’t always need meaning. But I’ve liked books more than this one.

A depressing yet beautiful book. Each and every character, no matter how small, feels so incredibly human in their motives and behaviors in a way that few authors are able to portray. 

The book was comforting for me, a 20-something Korean-American who wants to please her parents but doesn't know exactly what she wants. I think there was a lot of love that went into this book with some characters being more lovable than others but ultimately shining on with a lot of human decisions. The selling point of this book for me is that sometimes people are just people and it conveys that feeling very well without being too in your face about it. 

Kwan Ann Tan

I feel like this book was perfect for me to read at my age - there was a LOT going on here and I think all the female characters were so vividly and beautifully portrayed in a wide spectrum. 

Nadine 

Another good offering from the author of Pachinko, albeit not quite as engrossing and a little overly long, but good insight into the Korean American community. some nice touches - the clothing and hat descriptions.

jam 🍯

I absolutely loved this book and have been emphatically recommending it to everyone I know. The intricacies of the Korean immigrant experience is really laid bare here, and for all of its fantastic specificity, it feels shockingly universal in many ways. I loved Casey, the protagonist, because of how contradictory she could be, because that felt so human to me. She acts like she alone has to carry the world's burdens, and it feels cathartic to walk alongside her and see that maybe that isn't true of her, or me.

Fans of Pachinko will not be disappointed by Lee's debut novel. Its scope is much smaller, but still carries rich and expansive character work that reveals entire communities with deft grace. In many ways, I prefer Free Food for Millionaires because it feels more personal to me, but also more raw in a charming way.

I was super excited to read this book, as Pachinko was one of my favorites from last year. That being said, I found it extremely difficult to understand a lot of the decisions the characters were making, and as such I struggled to build empathy (besides maybe some for Ella and some for Leah). I think maybe this was because this book was set in my time with characters my age, so I expected them to resonate with me more. But, I’m also learning that maybe just because they had a reality I can’t relate to doesn’t mean the story shouldn’t be told.

Tanya Sutton

This book was really disappointing for me. It draws the reader in quickly, following the life of a young, first-generation Korean woman after her graduation from Princeton in the mid-90's. She is ambivalent about everything, from her job, graduate school, and her love life, and seems to wander from place to place without really finding what she's searching for. This novel had such potential with captivating characters and an engrossing story line, but the ending left so much unexplained and at loose ends, that I felt let down by the author. A good read, but don't expect a great finish.

Michelle Warner

kait

Allegrachatterjee

Paige Wanner

Milly (:

jacob ketcham

Leila Somani-Davis

The brilliant debut novel from the New York Times-bestselling author of Pachinko. 'Ambitious, accomplished, engrossing ... As easy to devour as a nineteenth-century romance' New York Times. Casey Han's years at Princeton have given her a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, a popular white boyfriend and a degree in economics. But no job, and a number of bad habits. The elder daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, Casey inhabits a New York a world away from that of her parents. As Casey navigates an uneven course of small triumphs and spectacular failures, a clash of values and ambitions plays out against the colourful backdrop of New York society, its many shades and divides. 'Explores the most funadmental crisis of immigrants' children: how to bridge a generation gap so wide it is measured in oceans' Observer. 'A remarkable writer' The Times.

Emily S &
Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

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Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee