Skip to main content

The I Index

Next in the queue

58

/100

I Index Overall Rating

Readers

38/100

Critics

77/100

Scholars

N/A

Author:

Grace M. Cho

Publisher:

The Feminist Press

Date:

May 18, 2021

An account of a Korean American daughter's exploration of food and family history to understand her mother's schizophrenia.

What The Reviewers Say

Jed Munson,
Full Stop
The human concerns Cho centers in her writing—the project of loving specific people, of remembrance—are as real and immediate as anyone’s living. This is not to say the archives she engages, and the one she enacts, are not also alive, but that Cho has managed a deft presentation of an uncertain and critically underserved past.
E. Tammy Kim,
The Nation
... intimate.

Booklist
Cho has been writing this book as 'equal parts therapy and eulogy' as she laid bare her achingly symbiotic relationship with her enigmatic mother. Nearly two decades since Koonja’s mysterious death, Cho write[s] her back into existence, to let her legacy live on the page, and in so doing, trace [Cho’s] own.' The spectacular result is both an exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation..

Kirkus
A Korean immigrant and sociology professor reevaluates her mother's past and their fraught relationship.