4.5 stars.

Crying in H Mart is a beautiful, honest, and heartbreaking account of a not-quite-perfect relationship between a daughter and her now deceased mother. Zauner constructs memories of her mother around their mutual love of food, specifically the Korean cuisine of her mother's homeland.

This is a very humbling portrait of grief, sorrow, and survivor's guilt. It is introspective and deeply personal and I was moved by her ability to put her own failures on the page and be honest about how she felt about her mother, from childhood clear through struggling with her mother's illness and eventual death. The writing was very raw and, though it was nothing super flashy...just an ordinary relationship between a fairly ordinary mother and fairly ordinary daughter...it hit hard. Perhaps that is exactly why it hit hard, it was relatable. I struggled with reading through the pages where her mother was undergoing chemotherapy, drudging up my own feelings of guilt and sorrow from the time when my own mother was facing the same thing. Her grief and tribulations were not the same as mine, but there was a thread of commonality there that I think allowed me to be absorbed by her story.

A well-written chronicle of a parent-child relationship and a very comprehensive exploration of feelings surrounding heritage, coming-of-age, and grief. Well worth the read and best done via the audio, read by the author herself.