Reviews tagging 'Panic attacks/disorders'

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

15 reviews

_annika__'s review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

3.75

Overall this is a good book, the writing is good, her story is emotional, evocative, and entirely relatable for anyone who has experienced familial grief and terminal illness.

The issue I have with this book is personal, but perhaps relatable to anyone from a small town - I almost had to put the book down because I couldn’t stand the author continuously calling Eugene, Oregon (second biggest city in the state, a major PAC12 college town, an hour away from Portland) small, boring, and dull. Almost every single person I’ve met that’s lived in a <10,000 person town (and bigger, honestly) would KILL to be in Eugene. If the author would have said “I hated growing up in Eugene” I could’ve moved on, but she seemed to hate it specifically because it’s “small” and because there was “nothing to do.”

Every kid that’s suffered growing up in a 3,000 person town in the middle of a corn field somewhere in the Midwest - where 99.99% of the population is white and so strictly religious they unironically call Halloween “the devil’s holiday” and avoid you like the plague if you don’t go to their same church (imagine if you don’t go to church at all, and they repeatedly egg your house for it) - would have likely cut off a finger or two to grow up in Eugene or anywhere near it. I’m hoping the author bemoaned her adolescence in such a “small town” for dramatic effect and that she didn’t actually feel that strongly about it.

I understand teenage angst and depression and would have been more understanding if that was the main reason for feeling the way she did growing up, since most teens experience those feelings and at least at the time, likely no matter where you live, we feel like we don’t belong and we hate it there. But the amount of those feelings that she blamed specifically on the “small dull Pacific Northwest town” she lived in personally made my eye twitch. Growing up in a larger, modern, and progressive college town (often rated one of the most progressive cities in the entire U.S.) would be a privilege to sooo many.

Since the reader knows she’s writing this post-adolescence I was waiting for her to correct how she felt about this small town with “nothing to do” (aside from going to record stores, go vintage clothes shopping, get specialty Korean ingredients from a local market, and see Modest Mouse - just to name a few). Again, I acknowledge this as a personal issue taken with the book, but I assume most people that grew up in rural or small towns would struggle and also feel that a large part of the author’s adolescence and story is unreachable and I relatable because of this as well.

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daniofthewood's review

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hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

5.0


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biab00's review

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

This book is beautifully written, can't explain the feelings I have for it so here's one of my favorite quotes:

Sometimes my grief feels as thought I've been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I'm colliding with a wall that won't give. There's no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.

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edencameron's review

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emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

5.0


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raelong12's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.5


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xeno_reads's review

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emotional inspiring sad medium-paced

5.0


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mirandyli's review

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Crying in Hmart has got me crying in Hmart. If you are a second gen East Asian immigrant, this book will make you cry. It was so painfully relatable and will make you want to hug your mom, no matter how much you hate her. Book of the year.

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literaryinluv's review against another edition

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emotional funny inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.75

Listened to the first 30% of this while pulling strands of my mom's hair through a highlighting hair-net and joked that there should be a Filipino-"Crying in Seafood City"-version. Then cried a few days later while washing the dishes because of the wedding scene. A relatable delight. 

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gabriella_'s review

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dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

I am in awe of this book. I cried many times reading it.

A lot of this book I personally resonated with. While I am not Korean, the mother-daughter bonding, themes of feeling disconnected from culture, grief, and transcending love of food hit very hard. Zauner finds a way to bring a personal story up and close to the reader. She has a way with words.

I can’t express how grateful I am to read this book. It feels like a warm hug. I hope anyone who has struggled with grief, especially those who mourn a mom or motherly figure, walk away from this book with even a shred of comfort. There is so much I want to say, so much thanks I want to pay the author for being as vulnerable as she was. And so much I want to thank her for, for expressing how painful her journey has been.

Some lines of this book really stuck with me, and I’ll end this review with one that made me audibly sob.

When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.

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mheiling's review

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emotional funny sad fast-paced

3.75


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