I knew I had to get my hands on Y/N as soon as I read its perfect first chapter in the Paris Review a few months ago. This is a really excellent debut novel. The prose is clever and poetic without being cumbersome to read. The narrator is so wonderfully strange.

Y/N is a novel driven by singular obsession. The unnamed narrator, a Korean American woman who lives in Berlin, lets her roommate take her to a K-pop concert, and she immediately becomes obsessed with Moon, the youngest member of the group. "I was being sent to the other side... My First Time, experienced at the age of twenty-nine, made me wonder about all the other first times to be had. The world suddenly proliferated with secret avenues of devotion." Loving Moon becomes a quasi-religious experience for the narrator, and she realizes she is willing to "trad[e] in a real-life adult lover for a boy star who doesn't know she exists."

I've been telling everyone who will listen about this book. There is no way to describe it and do it justice. I will say that the first chapter is by far the best, and things slow down a little bit in the middle, but overall this is an excellent read, certainly the best debut novel I've read in a very long time. I love Esther Yi's fake K-pop lyrics. This will appeal to fans of Nabokov and Calvino.

This felt very reminiscent of Untold Night and Day to me, but definitely still super unique. Dreamlike writing and interesting premise. I really enjoyed this one, though it’s genuinely so hard to articulate any thoughts about it. I had no idea this was going to be so surreal and absurd and was expecting a more straightforward story based on the summary, but this slayed so hard — I honestly love a book where I sort of don’t know what on earth is going on. Absolutely crazy for a debut. 100% a book for the hot girls
4.5/5 stars

2.75 stars

Actually, I have no clue what I just read. Did it kind of slap, though? Maybe it did?

This book describes the very weird, one sided love and obsession a fan can have with their idol. It’s about the humanity of this celebrity and questions how much the fan actually knows about them.

I really enjoyed that aspect, especially since I’ve dabbled in fandoms and especially the kpop one, on which this book was based, but the book is definitely more speculative and has more flowery writing than the books I normally read and gravitate towards.

So, was this a book for me? No. Was it good? I think so?

Thank you Netgalley for providing a copy of this book. Unfortunately, this was not the right fit for me. I was very excited to read this because the plot sounded intriguing. I thought the writing was good, but it was all hazy for me (and not in a good way). Overall, I wasn't eager to pick it up again whenever I put it down, which is a shame! But I'm still looking forward to reading Esther Yi's future works.

Y/N felt like a fever dream — I didn’t know what was real or fake. I think I wanted to like this more than I actually did due to the detached writing style. It definitely took me a while to get into it! I’m loving all the new releases based on kpop/idols/fandoms and this one dives into the mind of one deranged fan. A Korean adoptee who lives and work in Germany with no interest in Korea finds herself obsessed (and I mean OBSESSED) with idol Moon after attending his concert with her friend. When he announces his retirement, she decides to book a flight to Korea in hopes of finding him.

While in Korea she meets a bunch of people who are also fans of Moon’s group but the conversations and interactions they had felt fake so it didn’t seem real that this would actually happen. The way they conversed were so weird tbh but that could be the whole point?

Anyways I’m just wondering if this whole thing was just in the protagonist’s head haha.

Not at all what I expected it to be. I found the writing, while often beautiful, to be so cold and distant and that made me not enjoy it. I didn’t really understand what was going on for most of the book and not in an enjoyable way unfortunately.

Book 21 ⭐⭐⭐

This book is about an unnamed Korean woman living in Berlin who becomes obsessed with K-pop idol, Moon. When Moon disappears from the public eye, she goes to find him. It contains themes of obsession, reality vs fiction and identity.

I loved the first third of the book. It was so enjoyable to read about fandom, especially K-pop, which I have rarely come across in books. I especially enjoyed reading about our main character watching Moon on a livestream. The author captured that experience perfectly. The writing is also beautiful. For example, “I need him there. I need to know that at the very moment he’s looking down at his hands somewhere in the world.”

The title refers to the fanfiction trend of using “y/n” for the reader to insert their name in as the love interest in the story. I really enjoyed that the story involved fanfiction, but it was also kind of annoying after a while. It would go into a fanfiction without warning, which I guess is maybe the point of blurring reality and fiction, but I wanted to get back to the “real” story. I also didn’t really understand the ending, which isn’t the fault of the book, but I think some of the more philosophical elements went over my head. Overall an enjoyable read.

(Thank you to NetGalley @netgalley and Astra House @astrahousebooks for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.)

#YN #NetGalley #Bookstagram #NowReading #2023Reads #fiction

When I was 12, I would absolutely positive I was going to marry Joey McIntyre from the New Kids on the Block. He was EVERYTHING to me. I was ready to convert to Catholicism, move across the country to Boston - because I was sure that he would want to live there forever, and to have a million children with this blue-eyed cutie.

Y/N by Esther Yi is the story of a parasocial relationship of our unnamed narrator and a KPOP star Moon. Once Moon announced his retirement, the narrator takes things to the next level and goes to Korea in search for Moon. Moving from beyond the 'celebrity crush and....well, let's be real, almost stalker level.

This book should almost be viewed as a cautionary tale. When the NKOTB announced a break, I never went to Boston or L.A. in search for Joey. Sure, we once were both at a dinner with 100 other people and i was 100% that he winked AT ME, but.....that's different. This story is....something else.

This book is almost a horror novel about fandoms....because I'm terrified.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review.

The writing style and storyline were magnificent. Will definitely be recommending to a friend. Thank you netgalley!

Y/N was a WILD ride of a book. It looked at fandom, a topic that seems to be in vogue lately, both in fiction and non-fiction. I appreciated the style and the fan fiction within in the book, but I don't care for stream of consciousness writing.

a very unique look at fanatical obsession, becoming increasingly surreal and delightfully bonkers as we see our narrator become infatuated with a kpop boyband member and starts meeting other stans. this was such a trip, and a lot packed into this short, one-sitting story. Yi is a writer to watch.

Utterly absurd and fantastic. A perceptive novel in the vein of modernist stream of consciousness. It is this attempt to understand the nature of obsession and the power of the mind to bend reality. Esther Yi works literary magic here but simultaneously critiquing celebrity obsession, super fandom, while making room for compassion especially for readers who may not engage with super fandom (ala - BTS, Justin Bieber, Brittany Spears, etc).

Trust. Obsession. Trust in obsession.

Love. Dellusion. Love in dellusion.

In philosophical femcel fanfic critique, Yi rolls snowball as fallacy and does not stop through Germanic sentences crafted from strange stiffness. The fuel is in all the crafty ways in which oddball speech and characters collectively create this aura that is absorbing and just as obsessive as the protagonist.

There are no limits. There is only the magnitude to which we take on a life worth living through the deep dive pursuits after a K-Pop idol. What is worship? What is faith? Devotion? Self-sacrifice? What is idealogy?

Ruthless, sharply ironic, fantastical, and downright unhinged, this is an oddball debut that takes the cake.

In Esther Yi's "Y/N," a young woman living in Berlin becomes obsessed with an "idol" singer, Moon, after being shown his performances by her roommate. Having previously not understood the allure of fandom, the unnamed narrator's interest in Moon quickly blooms into an all consuming obsession, including writing the type of fan fiction that gives the book its title. The author has a good turn of phrase and some of the descriptions made me laugh. However, the dialogue reads in a very artificial way and I found it difficult to believe the characters were really having conversations as depicted. The book becomes more experimental as it goes along. It is an interesting experiment and an original way to write about fandom, yet can sometimes feel alienating.

Reading this book felt like being plunged into a strange dream. Y/N only ever has one foot in reality, and only just long enough to reel you in. We follow the all-consuming obsession of an unnamed narrator with Moon, a K-pop idol, after being dragged to a concert. Watching him on stage, she experiences something akin to spiritual enlightenment. Soon, she finds herself fantasizing about him, writing self-insert fanfiction, and attending fan meet-ups. Then tragedy strikes: Moon leaves the band, and the narrator embarks on a quest to Seoul. From here, the narrative starts to dissolve as the lines between reality and fantasy, the body and the mind become malleable.

Y/N luxuriates in its experimental writing; it is unabashedly pretentious. And to anyone with a cursory knowledge of fandom--and particularly fanfiction, one of its primary forms of expression--it feels incongruous. Fandom is still mostly treated as a frivolous oddity, but this book engages with the psychological experience of being in fandom on a deep and sincere level. The result is electric. I spent weeks thinking about Yi's obsessive protagonist, about the value we place on different forms of writing and art, and of course, about the enigmatic Moon's neck.

Thank you to NetGalley for the digital ARC.

Y/N is a book that dares to surprise. Initially swept in the premise of how to navigate a fandom, from there Y/N morphs into a book of endless potential, whether good or bad, about how to approach knowing someone. Never boring, always curious, Y/N is a book that boasts careful--and daringly--a considerate obsession of sorts.

I'm not sure what even happened in this book.....?

Initially I was so intrigued by the whole concept of the book as it spoke to me and I could somewhat relate to the character (or so I thought). Asian descent? Me. Kpop enthusiast? Me. Living in Germany? Me.

I am very familiar with the fandom culture, fanfictions, the strong parasocial relationship that the Kpop industry commercializes. I know how far "obsessive Kpop delulus" would go just for their "bias". However this book just wasn't doing it for me. I felt a disconnect between the subplots and I see no correlation in anything that happened in this book. The concept is fresh and ambitious - so ambitious that it missed the mark.

Points for the concept & writing.

A thirty-something unnamed woman of Korean descent. is living in Berlin. She has a deadend job and is torturing herself in a one-sided love affair. But her world changes once she accompanies her roommate to a K-pop concert, and she falls in love with one of the members. From then on, everything in the novel is about the narrator's search for Moon. Somehow she starts to believe his absence is proof of her existence, or something like that. She even goes to Seoul to find him, joining forces with random people who aid her on her search.
I did not like this book. I feel too old and uncool for it. I did not understand the narrator's obsession with Moon, the randomness of her encounters with people in Seoul, her character arc, or the ending. I feel like Yi was attempting to do something ambitious with this book, exploring the meaning of human connection in our world (what makes love real?), but ultimately it was beyond me.
Thank you to Netgalley and Astra Publishing for the ARC.

I was very intrigued by the premise and concept of this book but the execution was a letdown. I feel like it focused too much on these extreme ends of fandom that it missed out on the nuance needed to understand parasocial relationships in fandom culture. I have never been a big fan of stream-of-consciousness writing that is typical of the ‘sad girl’ literary novels. but this was especially tough to get through because not only was the main character having huge monologues, but side characters also indulged in these pretentious expositions and cease to be relevant once they relayed their passage. I understand that the author wanted to tackle several themes within this book. Still, it never fully manifests in the writing and at many points ends up feeling like the author’s own notes and observations transplanted onto a character. I liked the writing style in some sections and it definitely took away some quotes I’ll think about, but overall I feel like this mish-mash of the bizarre and the existential did not work well. perhaps someone more involved in kpop culture, with a penchant for this particular style of literary fiction may enjoy this book.

In short, I think this is a good book. It's very well-written, it's interesting, and Yi strikes a great balance between having overly flowery prose, and using plain, bland language. For a novel that explores the world of fanfiction, I think I expected it to be a little more fun, but that's on me.
Overall, Y/N is surreal, thought-provoking, heady, and just one-of-a-kind.