Category: Reviews & Comments
Newsweek Interview with Charlene Dy
I wasn’t able to post this earlier. Here’s an excerpt:
Newsweek: But there was so much adultery in the book! Everyone was sleeping around and breaking up with each other. It’s sort of a dim view of love.
Min Jin Lee: Love is an absolutely tantalizing, beautiful thing. And yet, it is profoundly disappointing, too. I think adultery is a wonderful metaphor of betrayal. Sex is this intimate act between two people. In its highest form, we believe that it’s to be held sacred between two people who love each other. And that’s the reason why adultery always wounds us so much. But, if you take that as a metaphor, you can have adultery in friendship, you can have adultery in any intimate relationship.
Read “Forget the Comparisons, She’s Unique” at Newsweek
Maureen Corrigan reviews Free Food For Millionaires on NPR’s FRESH AIR
Reviewing Free Food for Millionaires for NPR, Maureen Corrigan says:
“I read a terrific debut novel this week. It’s always heartening to find a good new writer, but what’s especially delightful about Min Jin Lee and her new novel, called Free Food for Millionaires, is that she’s taken up the expansive form of the nineteenth century novel and its concerns about money, marriage, and duty, to create a kind of Korean-American riff on all those sagas, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, where the principled heroine sometimes behaves like a downright fool.”
Follow this link to the NPR Website to listen to the podcast.
Newsweek Interview
Charlene Dy’s interview for Newsweek. Here’s an excerpt:
‘Free Food for Millionaires’ was about so much more than just wealth and class.
It’s about love.
But there was so much adultery in the book! Everyone was sleeping around and breaking up with each other. It’s sort of a dim view of love.
Love is an absolutely tantalizing, beautiful thing. And yet, it is profoundly disappointing, too. I think adultery is a wonderful metaphor of betrayal. Sex is this intimate act between two people. In its highest form, we believe that it’s to be held sacred between two people who love each other. And that’s the reason why adultery always wounds us so much. But, if you take that as a metaphor, you can have adultery in friendship, you can have adultery in any intimate relationship.
Read the entire interview at: Newsweek.com
Free Food for Millionaires Reviewed in Narrative Magazine
Free Food for Millionaires was Reviewed by Lacy Crawford in Narrative Magazine in the First and Second Looks section (requires registration). Here’s an excerpt:
“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. “
Interview at “Living Read Girl”
“Living Read Girl” :
“Question: Free Food for Millionaires is structured like a 19th Century novel. What is it about that style of writing that appeals to you?”
“Answer: …By comparison, I take comfort in the rules of a sonnet—the number of lines, the kinds of rhyme, the type of sonnets (Petrachan, Spenserian…) and the infinite variety of poems that can be written within the narrow rules of a form. I have studied the techniques of traditional story telling in the hopes of making the story almost easy to read. I worry obsessively about technique and tools and demand a great deal from each placement and change of word or idea, but I think when a reader picks up my book, she should never have to think about any of this.”
“Living Read Girl” on Free Food For Millionaires
Living Read Girl has this to say about Free Food For Millionaires:
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.
The Bellow-Roth Equation
Michael Scharf writing about Free Food for Millionaires in Publisher’s 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 the rest at Publisher’s Weekly
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