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Best-selling YA author and columnist Choi brings her talents to adult fiction. Moon and her daughter, Stevie, are both trapped. Moon, an actress whose popularity waned long ago, is forced to rent out their L.A. home just to pay the bills. Stevie is stuck in a dead-end service job and burdened by her mother’s irresponsibility. When Moon’s former costar dies, they’re reunited with Adam, Moon’s sitcom son and Stevie’s dearest crush. As the three of them weave in and out of each others’ lives once more, they struggle toward a new future together. Choi’s characters love and resent each other in equal measure. Intimacy is their only comfort in a world that’s otherwise indifferent to them. Caregiving, sacrifice, and loneliness shift and blend into a mess of psychosexual desires. Choi revels in this unsettling terrain. Though her maximalism sometimes ventures into twee melodrama, overall, this is a compelling novel driven by the vulnerabilities of Choi’s protagonists. Ultimately, their interior struggles are convincing and robust enough to make this a genuine page-turner.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A glass pool house in Los Angeles becomes a symbol for the dangerous neediness of the actors who live there. Beginning with an aging TV star’s fatal jump from a bridge, Choi offers an evocative study of Hollywood in all its seediness and self-importance. In a city shaped by performers, life is played out for an audience both seen and imagined. Moon and Adam, actors fromWabi-Sabi, a canceled sitcom, gather after Mac dies by suicide; Mac played the white husband, Moon the much younger Asian wife, and Adam her same-age stepson. The casting was a mirror of the real world: Moon had a long affair with Mac, Adam was in love with Moon, and Mac served as occasional father figure both to Adam and to Moon’s daughter, Stevie. Now, with the show ended and the money gone, Moon and 20-year-old Stevie live in the dirty pool house of the extravagant home Moon can no longer afford, which is rented out to rich strangers. Meanwhile, Stevie, less alluring than her mother, works at a burrito joint and bears the brunt of this life; Moon’s alcoholism and shameful neglect pairs with Stevie’s jealousy of the wounded, charismatic Adam and the betrayal she feels following Mac’s death. The plot is contained—Moon, Stevie, and Adam attend the funeral; Moon gets an audition—though the novel’s throughline is the transgressive sex that shapes all their lives. It’s a kind of currency for Moon, an oedipal addiction for Adam; it’s a surrogate for fame, but also, seemingly, bubbles up from the city itself. Choi’s characterizations are astonishing in their nuance—all is childlike performance in this world where no one is sure who they are, but by the end, the injuries are shocking and real. An impressive portrait of an ephemeral and savage world. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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A broke actor and her 20-year-old daughter rent out their home and decamp to their “money pit” pool house in the mordant adult debut from YA author Choi (Yolk). Moon, a recovering alcoholic who was born in Korea, clings to her glory days as a sex symbol in the 1990s, when she starred as a military officer’s younger second wife on a sitcom. Her daughter, Stevie, is accustomed to her mother’s recklessness, remembering how when she was growing up, Moon would often disappear for days on benders. Moon also carried on an affair with her married TV-husband, Mac, while Stevie nursed a crush on Adam, the actor who played Moon’s stepson. Now, after Moon learns of Mac’s death by suicide, she convinces Adam to visit her and Stevie, and his arrival further complicates the tormented relationship between mother and daughter as they move back into the main house and pretend everything is hunky-dory. The writing is leaden in places (“Stevie doesn’t know how many more trespasses against her self-esteem she can endure without becoming mutilated beyond redemption”), but the characters’ wit shines in their interactions, as when Stevie, explaining to Adam that an attractive 30-something blonde is Moon’s AA sponsor, adds, “You’re supposed to pick someone who ‘has what you want.’ ” This gimlet-eyed family drama has plenty of bite. Agent: Duvall Osteen, UTA. (June)