Free Food for Millionaires

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.