Here are 57 books that Bee-Bim Bop! fans have personally recommended if you like
Bee-Bim Bop!.
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Growing up, my family was a meat and potatoes family. The food was good but it was never really about the food. It was about eating together. When I got older, I ventured beyond the world of meat and potatoes, made more friends to eat with, and learned more and more to enjoy the little things in life. My two books are about food but also not really. They're community books. Family books. Adventure books. Same thing with the 5 books on my list. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
Ah! This book is so rich and wonderful! The illustrations are unique, textured, impactful, and balanced. The story is warm and fun, and I appreciate how it turns it around with the people sharing with Omu at the end.
The illustrations tell me, "Hey, this is a really good book!" and they do not lie. It deserves the awards it won. I just love how the story and illustrations are so simple yet so full. It's a classic.
A generous woman is rewarded by her community in this remarkable author-illustrator debut that's perfect for the Thanksgiving season, perfect for fans of Last Stop on Market Street.
Everyone in the neighborhood dreams of a taste of Omu's delicious stew! One by one, they follow their noses toward the scrumptious scent. And one by one, Omu offers a portion of her meal. Soon the pot is empty. Has she been so generous that she has nothing left for herself?
Debut author-illustrator Oge Mora brings a heartwarming story of sharing and community to life in colorful cut-paper designs as luscious as…
I am a children’s author who loves to eat and bake and cook and gather with others around a table. My writing somehow always has details about people coming together around favorite foods and drinks, enjoying the company of family and friends. Is it any wonder these are the sorts of books I love to read, as well?
How To Make an Apple Pie and See The World is a whimsical book that starts by asserting that making apple pie is the easiest thing in the world. All you do is get the ingredients at the market then mix, bake, and serve… But what if the market is closed? In that case, adventure ensues! One travels the world to procure the ingredients—Italy, France, Sri Lanka, England, Jamaica, Vermont—and then you mix, bake, and serve.
The last spread of this wonderful picturebook features a round table and a gathering of friends eating apple pie—is there anything better?
Bake a delicious apple pie--and take a trip with this culinary global adventure!
An apple pie is easy to make...if the market is open. But if the market is closed, the world becomes your grocery store. This picture book takes readers around the globe to gather ingredients for a delicious apple pie. First hop a steamboat to Italy for the finest semolina wheat. Then hitch a ride to England and hijack a cow for the freshest possible milk. And, oh yes! Don't forget to go apple picking in Vermont! A simple recipe for apple pie is included.
I am a children’s author who loves to eat and bake and cook and gather with others around a table. My writing somehow always has details about people coming together around favorite foods and drinks, enjoying the company of family and friends. Is it any wonder these are the sorts of books I love to read, as well?
Rebecca Estelle hates pumpkins—and this is something kids can hardly imagine. (Certainly, the gorgeous art makes you wonder how anyone could hate pumpkins!) But Rebecca Estelle had a chapter in life where pumpkins were pretty much all she had to eat and so she is sick of them.
However, when she accidentally grows an enormous pumpkin patch, Rebecca Estelle has to deal with the loathed pumpkins. And deal with them she does—pies and muffins and tarts and cookies and roasted seeds come out of her kitchen. She carves fabulous jack-o-lanterns (a magical two-page spread!) and her neighbors show up. “We thought you hated pumpkins!” they say. And Rebecca Estelle presses pumpkin treats and seeds into their hands.
Rebecca Estelle has hated pumpkins ever since she was a girl when pumpkins were often the only food her family had. When an enormous pumpkin falls off a truck and smashes in her yard, she shovels dirt over the pieces and forgets about them. But those slimy pumpkin smithereens sprout up in autumn, and Rebecca Estelle finds a sea of pumpkins in her garden.
A heartwarming classic for more than twenty years, this story shows what happens when one thrifty gardener figures out how to make other people happy with the squash…
I am a children’s author who loves to eat and bake and cook and gather with others around a table. My writing somehow always has details about people coming together around favorite foods and drinks, enjoying the company of family and friends. Is it any wonder these are the sorts of books I love to read, as well?
This book is a poem about people gathering around food, whether at tables or on picnic blankets, breakfasts in bed, or at a sidewalk café. The illustrations are beautiful—homes around the world, and spreads of all kinds of foods. The theme is gratitude—for food, for family and friends, for the diversity of the world’s tables that together make the greatest table. This is a quiet book—one that could be read as a prayer before a meal. It is invitational: “…so if you’re hungry, join us here, pull up another chair. We’ll all scoot over, make more room, there’s always some to spare.”
In a world of bountiful food yet increasing food insecurity, we are called to remember that all creatures have a place - and may be fed sustainably - at the greatest, communal table offered by our planet.
I’ve always been interested in stories about becoming. Whether it’s a coming-of-age story, a story about overcoming adversity, or a story about discovery or recovery, I find that the best books about becoming also tend to be books about resilience. For me, the lure of a book is often more about its themes and perspective than it is about where it’s categorized and shelved. Having written a memoir in verse for an upper young adult reading group, this is especially true of my experience as an author. Each of the books on this list has something profound and singular to offer young adult readers and adult readers alike.
If you like graphic novels, you’ll love this book. If you like odds-defying coming-of-age stories, you’ll love this book. (You’ll love this book!)
Robin Ha generously captures and shares her own turbulent teen years in this visually and emotionally stunning graphic memoir. An abrupt move from Seoul, Korea to Huntsville, Alabama changed everything for Ha overnight, forcing her to grapple with racist schoolmates, language barriers, and isolation, but also finding her way forward through drawing.
It’s a powerful meditation on identity, as well as an incredibly unique style of memoir.
Harvey Award Nominee, Best Children or Young Adult Book
A powerful and moving teen graphic novel memoir about immigration, belonging, and how arts can save a life—perfect for fans of American Born Chinese and Hey, Kiddo.
For as long as she can remember, it’s been Robin and her mom against the world. Growing up as the only child of a single mother in Seoul, Korea, wasn’t always easy, but it has bonded them fiercely together.
So when a vacation to visit friends in Huntsville, Alabama, unexpectedly becomes a permanent relocation—following her mother’s announcement that she’s getting married—Robin is devastated.
A Korean American author myself, I published my first book in 2001, and in the ensuing years I’ve been heartened by the number of Korean Americans who have made a splash with their debut novels, as these five writers did. All five have ventured outside of what I’ve called the ethnic literature box, going far beyond the traditional stories expected from Asian Americans. They established a trend that is happily growing.
In 1950s Sewanee, Chang and Katherine slowly
fall in love and find that the Souths of Korea and Tennessee are not that
different after all, both subject to lingering issues of class, family, race,
and civil war. I love the poetic language in this novel, as well as its
ambitious story and the complexity invested in every relation.
"This wonderful hybrid of a novel--a love story, a war story, a novel of manners--introduces a writer of enchanting gifts, a beautiful heart wedded to a beautiful imagination. How else does Susan Choi so fully inhabit characters from disparate backgrounds, with such brilliant wit and insight? The Foreign Student stirs up great and lovely emotions." — Francisco Goldman, author of The Ordinary Seaman
The Foreign Student is the story of a young Korean man, scarred by war, and the deeply troubled daughter of a wealthy Southern American family. In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the…
My interest and curiosity in this topic primarily came from life experience: not fitting in as a gangly Asian girl growing up in white suburbs and picked on for how I looked, working as a teen model in the late 1990s and early aughts, becoming a mother to three girls while opening up NPR’s first-ever bureau and living in Seoul, South Korea, the plastic surgery capital of the world. Ever since graduating from The University of Missouri-Columbia’s School of Journalism, I’ve been a professional journalist. Most of my career has been as an NPR correspondent, but I’ve also worked as a reporter for VICE and appeared in The Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, and numerous other publications.
If you are looking for a character-driven novel that takes you to modern Seoul and gets into the personal and social motivations for the cosmetic procedures that go unquestioned in South Korea, look no further than Frances Cha’s debut.
It’s an engrossing read with layered characters who are easy to root for, and a text that goes a long way to help us understand how the motivations for upgrading ourselves are not limited to just those on the other side of the Pacific.
A riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania
“Powerful and provocative . . . a novel about female strength, spirit, resilience—and the solace that friendship can sometimes provide.”—The Washington Post
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • Esquire • Bustle • BBC • New York Post • InStyle
Kyuri is an achingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a Seoul “room salon,”…
I am a scholar of international human rights and comparative genocide studies. My father was a refugee from the Holocaust. So I was always interested in genocide, but I did not want to be another Holocaust scholar. Instead, I introduced one of the first university courses in Canada on comparative genocide studies. From a very young age, I was also very interested in social justice: I was seven when Emmett Till was murdered in the US. So when I became a professor, I decided to specialize in international human rights. I read a lot of “world literature” fiction that helps me to empathize with people in places I’ve never been.
North Korea is a combination of the Soviet Gulag and Auschwitz. Under the reign of the three Kims (grandfather, father, and son), North Koreans have endured malnourishment and starvation since the 1990s. Most of this would been avoidable if the government hadn’t had ridiculous economic policies forbidding private enterprise, and also imprisoned anyone who criticized the Kims’ rule.
Remick is a journalist who introduces North Korea to a general audience by interviewing six refugees. I “assigned” this book to one of my ladies’ book clubs and they found it very interesting and easy to read.
An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books)
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST
In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population.
Eugenia Kim’s debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a critic’s pick by the Washington Post. For that novel, which is set during the Japanese Colonial Period in Korea, 1910-1945, and for her second novel (below), whose first half is set during the Korean War, 1950-1953, she read more than 500 books and twice traveled to Korea in order to accurately depict these little-known slices of history.
What happens after you survive the atrocities and randomness of war? Chang-rae Lee examines the deep intricacies of this question and its ramifications, portraying three survivors (Korean War, Sino-Japan War) whose lives mesh at an orphanage somewhere in South Korea after liberation. From that common crossroad, the lives of Sylvie, a missionary wife, Hector, a G.I., and June, a Korean orphan, are forever intertwined, shadowed by pervasive doom pitted against the human need to endure. Lee’s intense focus on physicality seems to reflect the characters’ bodily will to continue life, even as their hearts are blackened by tragedy. It is an intense and absorbing read, frightening for what we do to ourselves and how, despite all the darkness and violence we create in the name of war, some continue to persist in a semblance of life, and helplessly pass along the damage of war to those they touch as they…
June Han has forged a life thousands of miles from her birthplace: she has built a business in New York, survived a husband, borne a child. But her past holds more secrets than she has ever been able to tell, and thirty years after her escape from war-ravaged Korea, the time has come for her to confront them.
Hector Brennan, fighter, drinker and 'failure grand and total', is the man who long ago saved June's life. And between them lies the story of the beautiful, damaged Sylvie Tanner, whose elusive love they both once sought. On a journey that takes…
I grew up dreaming of other worlds, both real and imagined. I’ve since had the great fortune of living in Angola, Bangladesh, Gambia, Italy, Malawi, Mozambique, Myanmar, and Tanzania—each country as fascinating to me as the next. Yet there’s so much more of the world I want to experience! This is why I love novels that immerse me in the history and culture of foreign lands. By entering the hearts and minds of characters with different life experiences than myself, I feel a sense of connection that expands my own worldview. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
This heartwarming, multigenerational drama about the Korean community in Japan swept me into another time and place. Born and raised in a poor fishing village in Japanese-occupied Korea, Sunja makes an impulsive decision in the pursuit of love that transforms the trajectory of her life.
Thoughtful, resilient, and fiercely independent, Sunja was a relatable character whom I desperately wanted to see thrive. I felt her heartache when she left her beloved Korea and shared her indignation at the discrimination she and her family experienced in Japan. Expertly crafted and keenly observed, Pachinko shows us how history and politics shape the lives of ordinary people, often for generations to come.
* The million-copy bestseller* * National Book Award finalist * * One of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2017 * * Selected for Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club *
'This is a captivating book... Min Jin Lee's novel takes us through four generations and each character's search for identity and success. It's a powerful story about resilience and compassion' BARACK OBAMA.
Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja…
