Patricia Park dishes out a searing indictment of model minority expectations in her deliciously sharp and meaty sophomore young adult novel, What's Eating Jackie Oh?
Fifteen-year-old Jacqueline "Jackie" Oh is sick of "drink[ing] the model minority Kool-Aid." She'd rather sling hash at Melty's, her Halmoni and Haraboji's ("H&H") Midtown deli, than study for her overachieving parents' Ivy League fast-track. Then Jackie lands in the hot seat when she is successfully cast in the competitive cooking show Burn Off! Each episode's challenges reveal layers of complexity about Jackie's loved ones and their generational trauma, and cooking under fire helps Jackie appreciate her multitudes as a New Yorker, classic chef, and member of her Korean immigrant family. Like her beloved scrappy dish budae jjigae, Jackie is "not this or that," and "that is the whole point."
This ambitious and culinarily robust three-part novel picks up steam as the competition intensifies, and Park's snappy dialogue and mixed-media format (particularly show transcripts) enhance Jackie's complicated internal processing. Though the novel ends abruptly, H&H are delightful foils, and their imperfect English and frequent use of Korean anchor Jackie's family identity. Park crafts cooking scenes with conviction and authenticity and includes several recipes in an appendix. Park revisits themes of identity politics, academic expectations, maternal conflict, and belonging from her poignant YA debut, Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim, and she draws from her 2022 New York Times op-ed, "I'm Done Being Your Model Minority," and the spike in anti-Asian bias for this plot. The result is a candid and empathetic, if hunger-inducing, feast for teen readers. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf