Yolk by Mary H. K. Choi | Review

Thank you to Atom books for sending me a copy of Yolk for review.

Content warnings: Identity fraud, bulimia/disordered eating, toxic relationship, cancer, racism

If you’ve followed my blog for a while you may know that I absolutely adored Emergency Contact by Mary H. K. Choi, it’s one of my favourite books and I have thrown it into the hands of many of my friends. Unfortunately, I didn’t love Choi’s sophomore novel, Permanent Record, so I didn’t know what I was going to make of Yolk. But I absolutely loved it.

Jayne Baek is struggling. She’s struggling with college, love and life in general. Her sister June lives a high flying life, with a luxury apartment and super nice clothes and Jayne can’t help but be jealous. Until she finds out her sister has cancer… and has lost her job and health insurance. June asks Jayne to pretend to be her so that they can use Jayne’s health insurance and the pair begin to repair their broken bonds.

Choi just has such a great way of writing melancholy, I felt like I could relate a lot to Jayne even though I haven’t gone through the same things as her or anything. It simply came from the way that Choi can write sadness, it reminded me so much of my late teens/early twenties.

I honestly adored the relationship between Jayne and June. I think often we see stories of sisters who either hate each other or adore each other and not much else in between; in Yolk Jayne and June have a really tumultuous relationship which they begin to patch up through June’s health problems as well as helping each other sort their lives out.

Jayne has a really complicated relationship with her mother, this culminated in her leaving home as soon as she could and not going back. I honestly don’t think I’m smart enough to explain to you how well this was written in terms of cultural background due to the clash of ideals from a Korean household in Texas.

This isn’t a great review and I’m aware of that because I just feel like you need to go into this without knowing a whole lot, and I also have no idea how to describe it. Please just understand I absolutely adored this novel.

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