Review by Booklist Review
Versatile wunderkind Chong follows his enigmatic masterpiece debut, Flux (2023), with a gorgeously composed, (perhaps surprisingly) streamlined Korean American family drama. After 23 months in a coma, Jack Jr. wakes up. But his new reality isn't particularly rejuvenating. His fiancé is gone, his advertising job doesn't exist, his apartment's cleared out. His hard-won Manhattan life is over, leaving him once again stuck in New Jersey, an existence he worked so hard to escape. It's 2021, though, so at least he missed most of the pandemic. What his "thirty-year-old-actually-twenty-eight-year-old body" is about to face is possibly more terrifying: the estranged family he hasn't seen in 10 years. His only viable future takes him back to his childhood home in Fort Lee and working again at his family's (struggling) sushi restaurant. Harder than the labor will be resolving and (somehow) renewing his closest relationships with his divorced (still amicable) parents, his seven-years-older recovering alcoholic brother, and his almost-grown teen nephew. Seeing his male nurse ("Male nurse? Is that real?" Jack Jr. embarrasses himself plenty) outside of the hospital could be healing. Chong deftly, poignantly, gloriously transforms family dysfunction into universal life lessons about how independence and autonomy don't have to mean giving up unconditional love, underscored with a ringing reminder to never take it for granted.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A gay Korean American man wakes up from a coma and reckons with unresolved family issues in this perceptive story of arrested development from Chong (Flux). Jack Jr., the 30-year-old narrator, has no recollection of the car accident that put him in the hospital two years earlier, and his family is silent about the whereabouts of his fiancé, Ren. Told that he's lost his copywriting job along with his Manhattan apartment, he reluctantly moves back in with his parents in Fort Lee, N.J., the hometown he fled at 18 after refusing to take over the family sushi restaurant. Now, with nothing else to do and heartbroken to learn Ren has married someone else, he starts pitching in at the restaurant. His parents remain reticent, however, preferring to act like he'd never left. Just as he begins to settle back into his old life, he starts a new romance. Torn once again between forging a new path and meeting his family's expectations, he realizes he's never really matured. Chong expertly captures the family's complicated dynamics and ratchets up the tension as they finally break the silence about the past. It's a satisfying drama. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
The latest from PEN/Hemingway finalist Chong (Flux) follows 30-year-old Jack Jr. as he wakes from a coma after nearly two years, with no memory of what happened to land him there. All he knows is that he has lost nearly everything meaningful to him: his job, his fiancé Ren, the city life he loved--all gone. He even missed the worst of COVID. What he does have is the family he's avoided for most of his adult life and their sushi restaurant in Fort Lee, NJ. Jack Jr. returns home to help run the restaurant, reconnecting with his family all the while. When things feel off, Jack Jr. often retreats to unappreciated humor rather than risk genuine moments, and the character's awkwardness and angst are embodied in audio by Isaac so completely that it feels as if the narrator could have been Jack Jr.'s blueprint. While Jack Jr.'s family rarely notices his jokes, narrator Isaac perfectly captures every quip, from wry to sardonic. The novel might have listeners tearing up as they, along with Jack Jr., come to the painful realization that his old life is truly over, even as a new life rises from the ashes. Jack Jr.'s anguish is impossible to ignore, leading to a heartfelt finale. Though the other characters' voices are also performed well, it's Jack Jr.'s that truly shines. VERDICT A truly moving story of a gay Korean American man making peace with his past and rediscovering his family and dreams.--Matthew Galloway
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