The best books on Korean Americans 📚

This book will capture you with a heroine who is both irresistible and flawed, and will engross you with increasing twists in a triangle of love and sacrifice. The story explores how a fateful choice colors a decade of marriage, and challenges a young woman’s ambition already constrained by traditional Korean culture. Sam Park paints all the flavors of post-war Korea in this vivid debut, and his understanding and expression of the human heart is universal.

Growing up as a first-generation Korean American my heart ached with love to read this book. It truly celebrates Korean culture and its ties to family. Kim portrays our young protagonist Yoomi, a black and white cat experiencing something everyone has gone through—a bad day while highlighting some of the warmth and joyful things about Korean culture, my favorite topic being food. The end cap of the book features a recipe for kimbap. I love that she does this because growing up my mother would pack me kimbap for lunch and kids would immediately peg it as sushi. Little me… show more.

An intergenerational story about a young girl, Junie Kim, who finds the strength to face up to the bullying and racism in school thanks to the stories shared by her grandparents is heartbreaking and inspiring. 

Though this story is set in North America, the flashbacks to Korea during the war between the North and South are chilling and authentic.  

It was fascinating to read about the Korean War and the struggles of the masses as they tried to escape to the West in search of a better life for themselves and their families. It also gave me a sense of… show more.

Yumi is a girl trying to both please her Korean parents and live her own dream – that of attending comedy camp and becoming a stand-up comedian. I thought it was a fresh and funny take on the balancing act that many children of immigrants feel they must undertake. It made me think of the unspoken pressure I felt to study Science at university and how years later I was finally able to go back and study what interested me (creative writing!).