Reviews with content warning for Addiction - Crying in H Mart

If I could give this book 10 stars I would! It was so deeply emotional, and gut-wrenchingly heart warming. It gives you a deep sense of appreciation for culture, and the importance of loving those near to you while they’re still here.

Content Warnings

abbycole's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

aliciae08's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Apparently I am on a memoir kick where grief is a massive theme. I read Crying in H Mart after seeing and hearing so many positive reviews, and I’m glad I did.

It’s about Michelle’s relationship to her mother and what happens when her mother gets sick, but it’s also about her relationship to herself/her cultural identity through food. She asks herself whether she can claim being Korean without her mother validating her existence, and making sense of her existence as a mixed child. She explores this relationship with her food, conjuring up memories of her mother within those recipes and snacks.

This memoir very much read as though someone was writing it for themselves. There are times when the characters aren’t at all likable. As some of the other reviews mentioned, the relationship comes across as sometimes abusive—but saying that, I think the relationship Michelle paints with her mother is very much her own, and she never describes it as being such (she might in the future, but right now she doesn’t). The book was good in that it felt very real. Michelle is not a gracious caregiver—she put so much on wanting her mother to see all the ways she she could adult. Very rarely are caregivers full of the grace the general society demands of them—they’re human and have a range of emotions from resentment to love to adoration to scorn, often in the same moments. Michelle captures this well.

Her relationship with her father is touched upon, and I can see her disappointment. Where she wanted someone to lean on, he was taking up all the space and grief, making decisions that would impact a child in a negative way, no matter the amount of financial support he may have given her in the end.

There were parts that felt mundane, as life sometimes is, but it still struck a cord with me.

Content Warnings

katschkekat's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

Content Warnings

readnoot's review

Go to review page

challenging emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

A terribly fantastic and accurate mirror for all something-American children, whether hailing from parents in interracial relationships, with immigrant backgrounds, or both. Zauner shares painfully honest depictions of her thoughts and feelings, even when they can make her seem somewhat villainous. Such scenes were both difficult to read and incredible to experience. Zauner has done a fantastic job showing everyone how human she is, and by extension, how human we all are, even when being so is hard or ugly or unforgiving. This should be required reading for all adults.

Content Warnings

More...