RaveThe Rumpus... this is not a rock-star-gets-book-deal situation, but a thoughtful, well-crafted piece of artwork that we should expect from a renaissance person ... I expected that we would get to see a familiar subject through a unique but mostly relatable perspective, with the engine—or what keeps the reader interested—being Zauner’s voice, her humility, and her ability to reflect on universal themes of growing up in a concise and clear way. Most of that is true, but also, like… shit gets wild. As a rule, memoirs do not have to be dramatic (or occasionally, traumatic) to be effective, but there are some stories in this book; from tales of punk-rock basements to a violent spat with her mother, the events in this book depict much more than a suburban slice of life. The relatable teenage angst is there, but Zauner’s memoir is also filled with anecdotes like seeing Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O deepthroating a mic on stage for the first time, or harboring the secret of her father’s infidelity ... reading Crying in H Mart has helped me feel pounds lighter during a heavy year.
T. Fleischmann
RaveThe Rumpus... when the narrative shifts from prose into verse without warning, I barely notice the change, which is perhaps the sign of an ideal hybrid form ... a largely accessible entry into its narrator’s head ... holds your hand as it pulls you along, progressing so smoothly that you want to resist the urge to stop and underline sentences for fear of losing the engine of that thinking ... Clutch does not hide behind these metaphors, because their prose is naked and unapologetically so ... Despite the abstractness of the book’s major threads, much of the prose is grounded in observation ... orces us to pay attention to the things closest to us, whether it’s the relationships we have with each other or the relationships we have with art.
