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Title details for I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong - Wait list

I Leave It Up to You

A Novel

by Jinwoo Chong
ebook
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Wait time: About 16 weeks
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0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 16 weeks
From the award-winning author of Flux comes “an endearing novel about second chances” (The Washington Post), with wise insights into love, family, and the art of sushi.

“Wise and poignant [with] mouthwatering descriptions of food . . . I Leave It Up to You is about finding—or rediscovering—the people who make hardship worth enduring.”—Bobby Finger, The New York Times Book Review
A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.
Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion that he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 a.m. fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night’s pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, too: that of romantic interest to the nurse who took care of him, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.
There is value in the joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 4, 2025

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780593727065

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780593727065
      • File size: 1214 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      October 1, 2024

      Chong (Flux, shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and optioned by Sony) pens a semiautobiographical family novel about Jack Jr., who awakens from a two-year coma. Unmoored, he returns home to the Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, NJ, and his parents' struggling sushi restaurant, where he finds love and second chances. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from February 1, 2025
      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 fianc� 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.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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