Free Food for Millionaires
Ratings28
Average rating3.5
Casey Han's four years at Princeton gave her many things, "But no job and a number of bad habits." Casey's parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold on to their culture and their identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into rarified American society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As she navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives around her, culminating in a portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots. FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by 19th century novels such as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one's identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.
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"Free Food For Millionaires" is engaging and exceptionally well-written story by Min Jin Lee. The story is medium paced and written in third person. Every character is portrayed with depth. The main protagonist of the story is Casey Han. It's about the difficulties she faces as she moves from her traditional Korean upbringing to a more contemporary American lifestyle, as well as the complexities of cultural divides, familial pressure, personal identity, and class problems. Reading this book was a lot of fun, so I want to read other books written by Min Jin Lee as well.
I feel as though I was nice in giving this book one star.
Why did I continue reading through the end? I wanted to see if there were any redeeming qualities to the book. I found Casey Han, the protagonist, to be insipid, irresponsible, and 2-dimensional at best. The other characters followed suit - sometimes surly, sometimes sexy, sometimes bewildering and bizarre - and the minor plot lines fell flat. I still have no idea what on earth happened at the end of the book; it left me feeling as though I started at the beginning.
This book was really disappointing for me. It draws the reader in quickly, following the life of a young, first-generation Korean woman after her graduation from Princeton in the mid-90's. She is ambivalent about everything, from her job, graduate school, and her love life, and seems to wander from place to place without really finding what she's searching for. This novel had such potential with captivating characters and an engrossing story line, but the ending left so much unexplained and at loose ends, that I felt let down by the author. A good read, but don't expect a great finish.
