advance praise...
“FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES is a first—a sprawling commercial novel in which the sons and daughters of Korean immigrants coming of age in the city are shown navigating the narrows of race and class to claim their adult lives.”
– Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News
“FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES proves an astounding, remarkably readable debut from a talented writer. Ms. Lee draws race, culture, class and young adulthood together in a coherent narrative.”
– Robert VerBruggen, The Washington Times
“Lee’s novel is ambitious and compulsively readable. She aims for the breadth of Balzac and the moral depth of Middlemarch...”
– Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle
"Not one character is introduced in this wide-ranging novel who doesn’t come alive and fill the stage, for a page or entire chapters; the effect is of a choir gradually assembling, so that by the end of this big, lush novel, the reader feels a community gathered—one that provides the most hopeful alternative to the harsh old ways and the even harsher new. This novel will make readers, particularly young urbanites, misty with recognition.”
– Lacy Crawford, Narrative Magazine
"No.1 Book Sense Pick for May 2007”
"Nine Auspicious Debuts of 2007”
– Publishers Weekly
"Lee’s book is actually a lot more ambitious than Goodbye, Columbus (1959). The protagonist is a Korean-American woman named Casey Han, who is the Ivy-educated, “unusually tall” first daughter of a Queens emigré couple, husband-and-wife managers of a Manhattan dry cleaning franchise. (Managers, not owners. One of the things that’s so impressive about the book is the deft detail it goes into on such matters as how Korean owners of dry cleaning concerns hook, and keep, such couples as the Hans—down to the differences in pay between husband and wife, and how much of that money is kept on and off the books.) The book focuses on Casey’s post-collegiate path in the wake of being disowned, but its scope is kaleidoscopic, and its scale is (as also promised on the back cover) very 19th century, with Lee flashing in and out of the heads of a very large cast.” [read more]
– Michael Scharf in Publishers Weekly
“Min Jin Lee’s keen eye for class concerns and her confident, muscular writing about the conflicting pulls toward one’s cultural heritage and the unknowable, wide-open future make Free Food for Millionaires a pleasure.”
– Meg Wolitzer, The Position and Surrender, Dorothy
"Wise, generous in spirit, and hilariously incisive, Min Jin Lee’s novel captures the raucous and deeply moving inner life of contemporary New York, and of the new America. Spanning the panorama of haves and have-nots, from the excluded to those who belong, Free Food for Millionaires stakes out new ground for 21st century American literature, territory both profoundly enlightening and utterly enjoyable.”
– David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
"A marvelous page-turner, with well-burnished subplots, this novel gives the 21st Century what the 19th Century knew we needed most: a young heroine with a range of worldly options that are all more or less seductive and all more or less unacceptable. It’s a wonderful book.”
– Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton and Her Husband
”Free Food for Millionaires is the best novel I’ve read in a long time. I’m sad to be finished and I desperately miss Casey Han - a perfectly imperfect character whose loyalty, chutzpah and great hats make her someone I wish I knew in real life.”
– Elisabeth Egan, Self, Contributing Books Editor
”Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee is an extraordinary book: totally engrossing, empathetic, realistic, romantic. Where did Min Jin Lee come from? How come she knows so much about people? How did she learn to write so well.”
– Carla Cohen, Politics and Prose
This is Min Jin Lee’s first novel and I have to say, this doesn’t read like one at all. FFFM reads more like the work of a seasoned pro at the top of her game. If you’re looking for a smart, clever and engaging novel, Free Food For Millionaires is your Golden Ticket, folks. [read more]
– "Living Reading Girl"
"I can’t wait to introduce Casey Han, the protagonist of Free Food for Millionaires, to my staff and customers. Casey, who graduated from Princeton without a job and a bad habit of running up her credit cards is straddling the world of her Korean Immigrant parents and the hot, hip, money crazed New York financial world. Like Jane Austen, she shows us layers of society through magnificently drawn characters in situations that fascinate and enlighten.”
– Elaine Petrocelli, Book Passage
”Free Food for Millionaires is a big, ambitious first novel. Min Jin Lee, who is both wise and clever, deftly stage-manages a vast and varied cast of characters, most of them from Korean immigrant families, all stumbling in their pursuit of the American dream. She makes the reader eager to discover where their errant quests will lead them.”
– Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall
"In her ambitious, skillfully written first novel, Min Jin Lee draws a panoramic portrait of contemporary Korean-Americans and their ‘white boy’ colleagues, lovers, and friends. Besides a revealing look at the clash of values between the immigrant generation and its assimilated daughters, we get a surprising study of the young Wall Street opportunists, debt-ridden strivers, lavish spenders, corporate flunkies, and manipulative entrepreneurs who populate one significant corner of American life. Impressive, engrossing, illuminating.”
– Alix Kates Shulman, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and Drinking the Rain
