Amy Tan meets Lauren Weisberger in Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires. Recent Princeton grad Casey Han is the child of Korean immigrant parents who work in a laundry in Queens. She’s a twenty-two-year-old first-generation American whose Princeton scholarships have catapulted her out of her immigrant background, and she’s acquired the expensive tastes and habits of her more advantaged, affluent classmates without the means to sustain them. Working in her first low-level job on Wall Street Casey quickly realizes that she lacks the opportunities of her trust-fund friends. She navigates 1990s Manhattan and struggles with jobs, lovers, money, cultural and intergenerational differences, and her family and friends.This is not simply chick lit about a career girl in the big city. Instead, it’s an absorbing portrait of New York City and its world of have and have-nots, narrated by a protagonist who carries a copy of Middlemarch around in her bag, and who finally begins to realize what she really wants. Readers who enjoyed Juno Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao should be drawn to first novelist Lee’s complex tale of cultural friction.
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