Yolk by Mary H.K. Choi Review

Title: Yolk 

Author: Mary H.K. Choi 

Age Group: Teen/Young Adult 

Genre: Contemporary Fiction 

Series: Standalone 

Star Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars 

*TW: Eating disorders, talk of suicide and self-harm, emotional abuse*  

If any of these things are sensitive or harmful to you, I would suggest not reading this book. Your mental health matters. 

              I received an advanced reader copy of this book from a contest run by the publisher, Simon and Schuster—thank you so much! 

I’ve been obsessed with Mary H.K. Choi ever since I read her debut novel, Emergency Contact. So, when I received an email that I’d won an ARC of it, I was so excited. It’s been sitting at the top of my book stack for a long time, beckoning to me with its bright and deceptively cheery shade of sunny-side-up egg yellow. As soon as I finished Legendborn, I dove in, unsure of what to expect. But, almost despite myself, this story drew me in and grabbed me by the throat, narrated by Jayne, sardonic, secretly smart, biting, and still wounded from their mother’s distance and emotional abuse. Add to that her own destructive tendencies, and you’ve got a life that’s basically a train wreck. But her world tilts on its axis all over again due to a call out of nowhere from her sister, June. June has severe ovarian cancer and asks Jayne to come help her while she goes through an extensive operation. But when Jayne comes to live with her sister, she begins to realize that long-buried memories are lurking just so in the back of her mind, and her fraught relationship with her sister, and her family in general, begins to fray. Will Jayne find her home within herself, her sister, or something else entirely?

This book: I’m not gonna lie. At times, this book was very difficult to get through. I myself have suffered from an eating disorder since early middle school. My relationship with food has been fraught and frayed for my entire existence, a struggle I’ve dealt with my entire life. Every calorie counted, my clothes sagging on me, spending days bent over textbooks and swimming in my clothing, ribs sticking out of my chest in stark relief to the rest of my body. I was insanely stressed at that point in my life and food felt like it was the only variable I could actually control. There were times when I had to put the book down or put it away and do something else for a while. This book felt like someone sticking a finger into an old, open wound: painful and raw and scraping. I loved Jayne’s voice, frank and dark and funny, and I loved experiencing the American immigrants from Korea as they grew up, and into young women. This book showed family dysfunction off to perfection, from the top down. I realized that the whole family had extensive generational issues that they were collectively avoiding. This book was gorgeous, emotional, darkly funny, and illuminating. I felt as though my childhood self was visiting me from the past, waving at me, happy to see me happy if not entirely whole. This book beckoned back to a dark period in my life, where just getting out of bed took an effort worthy of Hercules. I’m so thankful to tell you all that I’ve (mostly) made it out of that dark, hopeless place, though my demons are many. This book spoke to the little girl who was so busy paring herself down to nothing that she didn’t realize she was enough all along. This book was a love letter, to sisters, to broken families, to the broken bits and pieces that we shove in the back of a drawer, only daring to look at them occasionally. I loved this book and it might be my favorite of Choi’s three novels. The bottom line: Darkly funny, compassionate, and humane, I loved Yolk! One of my favorite books of all time! Next on deck: A Heart So Fierce and Broken by Brigid Kemmerer, Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Brayon, and Lore by Alexandra Bracken!