Reviews with content warning for Death - Crying in H Mart

Growing up, Michelle felt she could never do enough to please her strict Korean mother. Michelle never quite fit her mother’s ideal mold as she tested boundaries as a child and then pursued music while working as a waitress in early adulthood. The two butted heads continuously until her mom got sick with cancer. The illness brought them back together and made Michelle embrace the Korean heritage she had pushed away for so long.

This was a beautiful story about love, loss, and embracing your heritage. Zauner did a terrific job of taking readers on the journey with her and the story made me emotional at times. I loved hearing about how she reconnected with her culture and the internal peace it gave her. You can tell Zauner wrote this book to heal and I think she not only accomplished that for herself but others as well.

Favorite Quote: “Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime.”

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anotherauthor's review

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challenging emotional inspiring medium-paced

5.0

A beautifully written book about family, love, and culture, cleverly connected through food.

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bashsbooks's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

A love letter to the complicated relationship between mother and child, Crying in H Mart navigates the grief of losing loved ones and the grief of being disconnected from your culture. Zauner has an incredible and strong voice, ripe with unique observations and striking linguistic choices. And tracing these emotion and relationships through food? Brilliant.

Now I'm going to listen to Japanese Breakfast's Psychopomp.

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hanrutmoe's review against another edition

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reflective sad medium-paced

Reluctant to give this an actual rating as my view is very personal to me.

From the synopsis of this book, I wasn’t anticipating quite how heavily this was going to be about her mum’s losing battle with pancreatic cancer. Whilst I knew it was mentioned, it took up the vast majority of the first half and was quite detailed. As someone who recently lost her own mother to pancreatic cancer I’m not sure I’d have read this had I known just how in-depth this aspect was going to be.

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askirmishofwit's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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