Free Food for Millionaires | Min Jin Lee | I was sad when the book ended.

Free Food for Millionaires | Min Jin Lee | Precious scribblings for Ivy-Leaguers

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Free Food for Mill...

	Free Food for Millionaires Min Jin Lee Grand Central Publishing, 2008 - 592 pages average customer review:based on 57 reviews view larger image
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I was sad when the book ended.

I have become a very picky reader. Lately half the stuff I pick up I either don't finish or I merely skim to get the gist of what is going to happen to the characters. End blurbs and author promotions just can't make a book a sustainable read. FFM was such a pleasurable change. It is a book that is a little hard to get into, what with its scattered range of characters, but once you do, you find that most of them are people. I got to caring about the people, even our somewhat hard, rather unlikeable main person, Casey Han. The slant on the immigrant experience of the Korean families added some interesting background about another culture, but did so without being so different as to be inaccessible. In fact, the Korean experience mirrors those of so many other immigrant experiences (such as that in my own family): the parents and their worries about their children, their children and their difficulty in being both of another ethnicity and American. It's familiar enough territory that all of us can explore it.

Yes, in parts you wonder why the author is covering details so heavily, such as Casey's debts. And I don't personally feel all that much draw to the financial world. But basically it's a good story, well told, and you do come to care, even about Casey. It's the best book I've picked up in months. Read it with an open mind, at least at first, until it grabs you and you have to give up the other two books your were trying to read at the same time.

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Precious scribblings for Ivy-Leaguers

I picked up this book from my local library based on all the great press it had received. After finishing the book, my reaction is that the praise is only somewhat deserved.

I had been looking forward to reading this book -- not only because of the acclaim, but because the author and her characters come from a background like my own -- high-achieving immigrants who had gone on to successful professional lives in New York.

Yet, just fifty pages in, I wanted to put it down. I had to force myself to read. The dialogue, especially the passages between the protagonist and her sister, and the protagonist and her friends, is so precious it's brutally painful -- a sort of artificial, too-smart-for-it's-own-good witty banter. I found myself grimacing while reading.

But that wasn't the only problem. The author also indulges in these tedious passages of exposition -- indeed, as one critic wrote, too much tell, too little show. The book is 600 pages -- it could surely have been edited down to half.

As a testament to how unnecessary the exposition is though, and as a boon for me as a reader, I was able to skim pretty quickly and get into the plot and characters. I started to enjoy the experience, and read on. To be fair, this may be because the world and the characters in the book are so familiar to me, and because the author weaves a heck of a soap opera of a story -- lots of sex and intrigue.

Following the trend of excess though, the author even takes the soap opera too far, with infidelity not only plaguing the protagonist, but nearly every other character in the book -- not just her immediate friends. If it's not a theme, it's almost a parody.

The book also deals a lot with internal struggles and external appearances -- maybe the "society novel" angle is what appealed so much to critics. I couldn't help but at times think the "witty" banter, the peek into rarefied worlds was a bit of fantasy fulfillment for the author. Fans of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, this book may be for you.

There are also strong themes of materialism and desperation for power running through the plot, with very little laugh-out-loud humor. It's interesting that the author was able to capture my attention with characters that are in general, pretty unlikeable. I enjoyed reading about these characters, and the author constructs a decent ending, but I didn't leave the story wondering about the protagonist or hoping to one day learn more about her future.

A final bit of acknowledgement for the novel -- in last 20 years, there have been some widely very successful books about Asians, usually written from a female perspective and purporting to give an "insider's view" of the culture. Think Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club" and Arthur Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha." Many of them just stank of exoticism. This one is also has that cultural sampler feel, but for all its faults, is more familiar to me, and trades less on that exoticism.

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