Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner | book review

✧ This review is spoiler-free! ✧

“It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”

– Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Title: Crying in H Mart
Series: standalone
Author: Michelle Zauner
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: April 20, 2021
Category: adult
Genre: memoir
Pages: 256
My Rating: ★★★★☆
Goodreads page

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Synopsis

This is a memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

[ This synopsis was taken directly from Goodreads. ]

Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosozka | ARC Review

Title: Hey, Kiddo
Series: standalone
Author: Jarrett J. Korsoczka
Published: October 9, 2018
Genre: memoir, non-fiction, graphic novel
Pages: 320
My Rating: ★★★★☆
Goodreads page

This review is spoiler free!

I was given a free review copy from Graphix/Scholastic in exchange for a review. This does not skew my review in any one direction.

Synopsis

Hey, Kiddo is the graphic memoir of author-illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka. Raised by his colorful grandparents, who adopted him because his mother was an incarcerated heroin addict, Krosoczka didn’t know his father’s name until he saw his birth certificate when registering for a school ski trip. Hey, Kiddo traces Krosoczka’s search for his father, his difficult interactions with his mother, his day-to-day life with his grandparents, and his path to becoming an artist.

To date, nearly one million people have viewed Krosoczka’s TED Talk about his experience. Artwork from his childhood and teen years will be incorporated into the original illustrations for the book.

(This synopsis is from Goodreads.)