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joelogsliterature's reviews
92 reviews
Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom by Vincent Schiraldi
3.0
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
3.0
I wanted to read this a few months ago because Zauner came to speak at my university, and I'd recognized her as a member of a band who had a few songs I enjoyed. It took a bit to get around to, and I didn't expect much of this first book. I mostly listened to this via audiobook, reading only four or five of the twenty chapters. (NB: Zauner herself reads.) I was surprised by how strong the story was. Well-edited to be consistently punchy, Crying in H Mart provides great insight into Zauner's experience navigating through the quagmire that is growing up Korean-American, but this is only an ancillary component of the story. You get to know her and her family as well as the duality of her identity and how her family reacted to it, and then you get to why it is she cries when she walks into H Mart. The middle chapters of this book were absolutely heart-wrenching in their honest descriptions of decline and death. The painful inevitability was always lurking, but it still hurt when it came. Losing a parent is a hard thing. I hope Zauner's sharing her story with the world has helped her some in processing it.