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Frank Li has grown up attending his parents’ “Gatherings” with several other couples who all immigrated from Korea to Southern California around the same time. He’s known the other “Limbos” from the group his whole life, and while they’ve spent a few hours together once a month for years, they aren’t really friends outside of that sphere.
He’s never really dated anyone, and when fellow calculus student Brit Means starts showing interest in him, Frank is a bit surprised but pleased. She’s pretty, smart, talented and interesting. But Brit is white. European-American. And Frank has the evidence clearly before him of his parents’ opinions on that: Not only do they talk about how he has to date Koreans, they’ve already all but disowned his older sister for dating (and then marrying) a non-Korean.
After just a few weeks of blissfully dating Brit (behind his parents’ backs), he and fellow Limbo Joy Song, who’s been secretly dating a Chinese-American guy a couple of years, come up with a plan. Their parents would love to see them together, so they pretend they are. They put on a show for their families that they have started dating, but whenever they leave their houses they go out with their real boyfriend/girlfriend.
Seems like a perfect plan.
As time goes on, though, Frank realizes that as much as Brit wants to bridge the gap that exists between her simple, straightforward white life and his no-man’s-land of Korean ethnicity-but-Southern-California-culture, he doesn’t want to have to hide her from his parents. He wants the full dating experience, with his parents enjoying and accepting his girlfriend. And he starts feeling more of an appreciation for Joy.
Frankly in Love is a YA love story, but it’s more an exploration of the experience of children of immigrants. They don’t have the ties to their parents’ home country, often don’t even speak the language; they don’t do the work their parents have done, such as owning convenience stores or laundromats or other shops, because their parents have only worked nonstop at those places to give their children the “American dream” of a better life, getting higher education and becoming professionals. They don’t quite understand their immigrant parents and feel their parents don’t understand them. And as much as they feel “American,” they aren’t seen as fully such by whites who have lived in the U.S. for several generations or more.
Author David Yoon takes the opportunity to share some of his feelings and experiences as a Korean-American through his character Frank, and it’s a great opportunity for readers to gain an appreciation of his spot “in limbo” in society. His personal story is fascinating as well because he’s married to black, Jamaican-American author Nicola Yoon, and their love story was one that took his Korean parents a long time to accept. Having read some of Nicola Yoon’s books, including The Sun Is Also a Star, in which a Jamaican immigrant falls for a Korean-American guy, I am appreciating their own true-life story better.
I’d wholeheartedly recommend this book if it weren’t for the overabundance of F-words. So I recommend with reservations.
Rated: High, for probably 4 dozen instances of strong language, plus more uses of more moderate profanity. There are kissing scenes and two instances of characters having sex, though they mostly just fade to black. There are occasional crude references.
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