I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong (Flux) is a funny, bittersweet, heartwarming story about family, love, and making every minute count.
Readers first meet Jack Jr. in what he is slow to realize is a hospital room. He wakes up intubated and gagging. His nurse is thrown into a full panic: Jack Jr. has been in a coma for 23 months and was not expected to regain consciousness.
No one will answer when he asks for his husband. Jack Jr. has missed his 30th birthday and the first 18 months or so of the Covid-19 pandemic. A few weeks into this remarkable recovery, he returns home--not to his Manhattan apartment, but to his father's home in New Jersey. He goes back to the family business, a struggling Korean-Japanese sushi restaurant, which was once meant to be his life's work and which he has not seen in 12 years. Jack Jr. has lost everything, and he finds himself in an unfamiliar, masked world.
Jack Jr.'s painful new challenges are wrenching, but his love for his wacky family, and theirs for him, are unmistakable throughout. Alongside the flavors of carefully prepared nigiri, dak juk, and plenty of pork belly, humor and off-kilter love shine brightly in this tale of making the most of one's own time. While recovering from his physical injuries, Jack Jr. must also navigate old fractures with a family he hasn't seen in years, let go of a relationship with no closure, and remain open to a surprisingly promising future. The story winds up delightfully warm and soothing, for all the bumps along the way. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia