This was a tender, quiet story that I really enjoyed. I think the beginning and end were particularly strong, but I was invested all the way through. I naturally thought a lot about the idea of waking from a coma and coping with the time and living lost. In the case of Jack's story, that experience is also combined with second chances of sorts that wouldn't have happened without the coma. This made for a very compelling read that I definitely recommend.

My first book by this author and now I am anxious to read his first release, Flux.

Ratings
Quality of Writing 5/5
Pacing 4/5
Plot Development 4/5
Character Development 5/5

Overall Enjoyability 4.5/5

I Leave It Up to You, is a second chance story that follows 30-year old Jack Junior as he reintegrates back into life, and his family after waking up from a two year coma. I feel like the characters in this were fleshed out, and the family dynamics felt real. I loved the representation in this novel, and got the warm fuzzies by watching everyone figure things out with each other. With that said, a part of me did feel like something was slightly missing from this novel, and a couple of small questions that aren't answered.

Thank you, dear NetGalley folks for the chance to read an ARC. This is a great book filled with characters I got to know and love. The complications of life and love and family. Waking up and then waking up. Wonderfully readable.

Forthcoming novel from Jinwoo Chong. Endearing story about a young man who is hitting strides in his life - has a career, has asked his boyfriend to marry him, and is living the life he hoped for. After spending a weekend away to celebrate their engagement, Jack Jr finds himself waking up from a 2-year coma, an accident he can’t remember, and the life he had built has all but vanished. The story takes us through the rebuilding of a life, a career, exploring reconciliations, love, and reconnecting with estranged family. All the while finding joy in the process & learning just how valuable time can be when you acknowledge how easily it can all be swept away from you.

Great characters, all relatable. Good story pace, didn’t lose interest. Would/will recommend. Tentatively set for publication March 2025.

Thanks to Jinwoo Chong, NetGalley and Ballantine books for the ARC ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Jinwoo Chong has followed up his excellent, mind-bending sci-fi time travel caper Flux with a stylistically (and certainly tonally) more conventional post-COVID quirky family drama slash light romance. That's a lot of descriptors for one sentence. I respect Chong for refusing to be pigeonholed into the genre of his MFA-product debut, and while I'm somewhat missing the fresh-faced ingenuity of that novel, it's very clear that the same person wrote both novels. The narrative voice actually isn't that different, but it's been transported to a very different setting.

I Leave It Up to You balances its narrative threads very well: Jack Jr.'s post-coma life, the pandemic world he's unexpectedly woken up into, the plights of the family restaurant, the romance throughline, the Fish Daddy TikTok account, Jack Jr.'s relationship with his brother, Juno's ice-related class project, and so on. If writing a novel is a juggling act, this is a rather impressive one, keeping all of its clubs in the air and making sure the reader doesn't forget about any one of them at any given point. It also manages to incorporate hypermodern elements like COVID and TikTok without feeling forcefully modernized. For the most part the COVID references are very natural, and I feel like that's something that a lot of authors would fearfully avoid. I imagine a lot of contemporary fiction for a good while will arbitrarily place their timelines in the late 2010s to sidestep the issue.

Now, speaking of all those plot elements, the novel does sort of accelerate towards its ending. Several of the elements reach satisfying conclusions, but for some it happens too fast. There are some very last-minute complications written in that don't entirely work for me, though the actual ending does if I ignore how accelerated the lead-up was to it.

At the end of the day, this is a crowdpleaser. When things are going too well for the characters, it does throw a wrench into the works, but for the most part things progress smoothly and positively for the characters, almost too much so. But we also want the best for Jack Jr. and his post-coma, post-COVID life as he picks up the pieces of what he left behind and re-examines how he lives, so a lot can be forgiven.

i wanted to like this and i almost convinced myself too.

the plot felt like a background aspect of this book, and for good reason. there wasn't much going on and it was instead about the complicated relationships of jack jr. and his family, partners, etc. but if that's the device you're employing, your characters better be dynamic, huge, and very human. for me, this didn't happen at all. the characters fell flat and the dialogue became monotonous and boring.

that being said, i love love loved the character of juno and thought his scenes with jack jr. were some of the funniest dialogue i've read in a long time. sadly, that comedy wasn't consistent and instead was too sparse to be the saving-grace of this book. i also loved emil as a character, but we just simply don't hear enough about him. like ughhhh. it was frustrating as a reader to not get to hear as much as i wanted from the best characters of the entire book.

a very strong premise that definitely drew me in when i started, the momentum just didn't keep up as it rolled along.

many thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for this advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review of the book!

I received a free e-arc of this book through Netgalley. What would life be like if you woke up from a coma after 2 years? Would your family and friends still be waiting for you or would life have moved on? Jack Jr. wakes up to find that nothing is as he left it. But he doesn't know what caused his accident or what to do next. He had walked out on his family years before the accident, but now he is forced to rely on them as he recovers. A story about family and choices.

I wanted to love this book and I gamely gave it a try, but I kept getting bogged down in either the descriptions, the characters or the pace. It just wasn't forming any pictures in my mind and that's strange because I used to live in Fort Lee and I assumed I'd have a point of reference. I could not related to the main character at all and perhaps that is my issue. I do think it will be very appealing to many readers.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I do hope that it finds the right readers!

Cross-posted from Goodreads:

Disclaimer: I'm not (that) objective here -- I grew up in NJ, with this kind of mental proximity to New York City, with first-gen immigrant parents, in an Asian American community that sounds a lot like Fort Lee (and when I saw the names of sushi restaurants in my hometown noted in the acknowledgements, I did put down my phone and yell). I have also done the thing where I scooted very far away from where my family is now. (Oops.) So this read definitely felt personal and made me somewhat nostalgic.

BUT. I do think Chong's second novel holds up even without taking my biases into account. This one’s a much less ambitious novel than Flux, and in that sense might be more set up for success (though I did love Flux + it gave me such an existential crisis when I read it back in 2023). Once again, Chong is playing with time -- not literal time travel this time, but the falling out of time of waking up two years after your life ended abruptly and returning home as if everything and nothing has happened. Once again, Chong's writing pulls in genre influence and comedy like nobody's business. This time, he's taken on the romantic comedy, less ironically than Flux took on westerns and noir and other hypermasculine genres, but in a way that pulls on the most slapstick aspects of TV romcoms in a way I at first found jarring but then found quite charming. (E.g.: there's a scene where the main character, coma patient Jack Jr., chases his love interest to his bus. And literally pancakes on the side of the bus because his balance is off. Stay winning, bestie.)

There's a lot to love about this novel -- the worldbuilding is fun (and as another Asian who grew up in an ethnic enclave of NJ, felt very much like familiar territory, except of course the fish markets lol). And the parents are such characters with more fleshed out relationships to their kids than *silent Asian disapproval* (huzzah!) and with arcs of their own, and there's not a single character in this novel who's given a name that I disliked. (Even the ex! And even the one named Zeno, whose role in the story I will not disclose but whom I would have been predisposed to dislike in any other novel, probably!) In general, all of the characters are clearly trying to do their best in the world that they have, and they clearly all love each other so much, and it sometimes feels like everyone's making life harder and more dramatic than it actually is -- but that's the thing! When you love someone so much, feeling like you've disappointed them -- or that they don't need you -- feels that hard and dramatic. When you've spent so much of your life thinking your life can only be one way, and that you have to settle for how it is, every choice feels that hard and dramatic. And that's exemplified by the world of the story: Technically, Fort Lee (their hometown) and Manhattan (where Jack Jr. made his life) are divided only by the Hudson River. But when the gulf you've let grow between yourself and your family gets that big, that can seem like a distance of lightyears.

Was there a lot of rom-com logic in this novel (i.e., things that worked a little to0 easily, e.g., the finances, the coincidences, the ability to go viral (I'm sitting on myself so hard trying not to spoil in this review), the fulfillment of characters' dreams)? Yes.

Were there moments in the first half where the drama felt unwarranted? Yes. (But then I got to the midpoint of the novel and suddenly all the drama was extremely warranted and I think the first half had to happen for me to start thinking it was warranted -- maybe because I had started to understand Jack Jr. less as an a**hole and more as someone who is in fact trying his best and just genuinely doesn’t know what he wants, can’t trust himself to know, can’t trust himself with his own life and his own happiness…with the thought of who he could be to others…and is hiding that under layers of irony...this is just my take!!)

Did I actually feel like this family was facing financial hardship when it's just told to us rather than felt in terms of empty dining rooms, things actively falling apart in a way that isn't sentimental, etc.? Absolutely not.

Did I look forward to getting to the end of my day and being able to come back to this book while curled up in bed so that I could read it and smile to myself? Did it make me think about what it means to be loved and to be scared of the future and also excited for the future, and what it means to come home and find that people you thought had given up on you or don't have a place left for you are still happy to see you when you come?

Yes, yes, yes.

Many thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy of this novel! Once again, Jinwoo Chong's written an absolute banger and I'm so glad I got to read it this year.

LEAVE IT UP TO YOU follows the MC after he wakes form a two year coma and acclimates to his life post Covid, his family, his relationship and finds meaning in the new path before him.

While I thought the premise was great, loved the Korean/underrepresented ethnicity and the story revolving around food- I had a really tough time getting through this story. A lot of the realizations he had seemed trivial, the story while it started with a bang soon lost itself in predictable plot lines, I also felt like a lot of the big moments weren’t seen through- for example, while we learn how he ended up in a coma, the big WHY question was never answered- instead we get a vague description of what may have happened but never confirmed, the ending while also implies a resolution and future- it isn’t outlined as clearly, a reader we can assume but I felt it was vague.

Big points for LGBTQ MC- it was the main reason why I wanted to read in the first placeI

A 30-year old gay man, Jack Jr, wakes up in the hospital after two years in a coma, not knowing what happened to him or what has happened to his fiance. As he tries to piece his life back together (and figure out what happened), he returns to work in his family's NJ sushi restaurant after ten years away in the city. The rest of the book follows Jack Jr as he (re)establishes his relationships, particularly with family, and reconstructs who he wants to be in the world.
The book is more character study than plot-driven, and while events do move in fairly slow baby steps, that feels in line with what Jack Jr is going through. The pace and slow growth hit the right notes, not too rosy or unrealistic and not such a grim struggle that you want to give up. 5 stars might be rounded up, but the book really does succeed at creating the right amount of interest and sympathy to keep things together.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc!

This was such a interesting read. How do you start over when your life was ripped from you for two years but the rest of the world kept turning? I loved Jack Jr. He's so understandable, he makes perfect sense even in the moments he makes no sense. My heart broke for him in so many ways. But I also really loved his family. They're all so REAL. No one is evil, no one is a caricature. They're human for all that they are just words on a page. There's really no grand messaging or life lesson here. Except maybe that, everyone is just trying their best to roll with what life throws at them. Extend some grace to the people you love, and yourself. It'll do a world of good.

I was so excited when I was sent an ARC of this book based on the synopsis. And it did not let me down! I loved this book so much that I read it at a slower pace to savor it (also, the food descriptions made me very hungry and craving sushi all the time!)

The story revolves around Jack Jr. and his family after he wakes up from a 2-year coma and everything has changed. I loved the family dynamics, how they rallied around each other even though they had a lot of issues under the surface. Jack Jr. and Emil’s relationship trajectory was one of the most well executed I’ve seen in a bit.

First time reading Chong and I’ve become a fan!

Literary story about a young Korean-American, gay man who wakes from a nearly 2 year coma, and must navigate reconnecting with his estranged family, post-Covid society, and returning to the family's Korean/sushi restaurant that he'd walked away from 10 years ago. The pacing was slow, but the story was about emotions and not so much events.

The quick-witted narrator of this story, Jack Jr., has come out of a two-year coma to return to the family he fled ten years earlier. That family is a tight-knit Korean-American family whose members are involved to varying degrees in running a sushi restaurant. Yet even in this tight-knit family there are fractures with an attendant lack of communication. The family is quirky and engaging and running a sushi restaurant (a demanding family business) places the story in an interesting context. Over the course of the novel, Jack Jr. gradually finds his feet as he comes to understand what happened to those around him during his two-year sleep and figures out how to move forward, which is a lot about coming to terms with the past. Jack Jr. is entertaining and forthright as he carries the reader on his singular journey.

I'm sorry, this is a DNF for me. When the title of the first chapter and then first paragraph was full of obscenities, it was immediately disappointing. It's not a book I wanted to invest my time with reading.

Thank you, NetGalley and Ballantine for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I Leave it Up to You shares the story of a young man as he recovers from an illness, awakening mid pandemic and returning unexpectedly to his Korean American family in New Jersey. I was really impressed by the unique plot and perspective of JJ's story. I was eager to know what happened but also happily paced by the way the story developed. I'll gladly seek out Chong's other book. This was a refreshing novel to read!

I debated whether I liked I Leave It Up to You while reading. I enjoy reading and reviewing literary books, and I sometimes thought this read like a romance. However, upon completion, I decided it qualified as literature when I considered the author's characterization and themes conveyed through the story. When the novel opens, we meet Jack Jr., waking from a two-year coma with his nurse, Emil Cuddy, at his side. Jack Jr. has missed two years of his life, most of the 2020 pandemic, and the changes it has brought to hospitals, communities, and his family's Korean sushi restaurant. Jack Jr. had been in a relationship with a man named Ren before his accident and coma. Early in the story, it becomes apparent that Ren has moved on to another love, and Jack becomes attracted to his nurse.

Jack, the first-person storyteller, is never just Jack. He is Jack Jr. In addition to the name, there is a solid connection to his father, Appa, even though Jack Jr. walked out on the family several years before his coma. Jack Jr. follows in his father's footsteps and plans to take over the sushi restaurant in Ft Lee, NJ, a Korean enclave. The father, mother, and brother spent countless hours in Jack Jr's hospital room when it wasn't clear whether he would wake. The family, like many others, suffers from strained relationships. Although Jack Jr.'s mother, Umma, works in the restaurant, she lives separately from Appa and has a man-friend named Jo. James, Jack Jr.'s brother, is married with a teenage son, Juno, and a baby named Sam. James is a recovering alcoholic and has difficulty communicating with the family, especially Juno. However, all family members have tacit ways of showing unconditional love.

Juno refers to Jack Jr. as Uncle JJ and confides in him. Juno represents the younger TikTok generation in the novel's generational plot points. Juno posts Jack Jr.'s story on TikTok and sets up a crowdsourcing account to help with the hospital bills and restaurant maintenance. Although this horrifies some, it develops the story while maintaining the strong family theme and also some humor about commodifying health conditions and sympathy marketing so popular among Juno's peers. Other themes include homophobia, racism, and ageism. Many of these messages are conveyed through dialogue, and I appreciate that. Jinwood Chong uses much dialogue and employs quotation marks in the old-fashioned way, which is something I appreciate.

One of Jack Jr.'s fondest memories from childhood is doing fish runs with Appa. They would go out very early in the morning and buy the best quality fish they could find for the restaurant at markets. Now, Juno accompanies them on the fish runs, and they provide significant time to bond. Of course, a literal fish run is often a pathway along streams and rivers, from the ocean to freshwater lakes and ponds, where fish travel to reproduce. On a symbolic level, the fish run was a beautiful expression that described Jack Jr.'s migratory nature and return. Juno has some of the same tendencies, and getting to know them made this an enjoyable and relatable read.

Thanks for the review copy. The best thing about this book is the cover. I tried my best to like this book but I just could not get into it. I’m sure others will like it more than me,

A coma can drastically alter a person’s perception of and interaction with the world around them, which a witty yet disoriented man navigates upon waking from his two-year coma in I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong.
Jack Jr. wakes from a coma after 23 months to a world very different from the one he remembers: his advertising job, Manhattan apartment, and partner are all gone but in their place are medical professionals bedecked in protective gear and his family, who he realizes he hasn’t really spoken with or seen in nearly ten years. Now reliant upon his family to help recover and rehabilitate himself, Jack Jr. rejoins the family sushi restaurant, Joja, which he had been set to inherit from his Appa before running away to the city before. While sliding back into the life he had previously left behind in Fort Lee, New Jersey and falling into some familiar patterns, Jack Jr. also takes up some new roles, including a budding romance with the nurse, Emil Cuddy, who was there when he woke up and an attempt at a sage uncle for his nephew and the young trainee at the restaurant. In navigating through territories both familiar and unfamiliar Jack Jr. reflects on the memories of what he had left and what this strange opportunity has presented him as he decides what he wants to pursue as his path forward.
In a witty and emotional exploration of relationships and the choices we make, or just go along with, that impact how they develop, this story portrays the various characters in detail, making it easy to become invested in them despite the wide range of ages and interests they represent. Jack Jr.’s personality, most notably shown through his sense of humor, is displayed well throughout the narrative as a much-needed and well-deployed contrast that tempers the heavier subject matter of both health-related traumas, both his and that of others, and the bearing the weight of familial expectations, actual or imagined. The dynamics depicted in the various interpersonal relationships, particularly the familial ones, were realistic with the niggling, frustrating conflicts that arose and persisted for seemingly no substantive reason, and the supportive interactions offered just the right amount of touching sentimentality before the mood was reset by a well-timed joke.
Overall, I’d give it a 4 out of 5 stars.
*I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.