Title: What’s Eating Jackie Oh?
Author: Patricia Park
Genre: YA
Rating: 3 out of 5
Jackie Oh is done being your model minority.
She just hasn’t told her second-gen Korean American parents yet. They would never understand her unconventional dream to become a professional chef. Just ask her brother Justin, who hasn’t heard from them since he was sent to Rikers Island.
For now, when she isn’t avoiding studying for AP World History, Jackie is improving her French cooking techniques and working at her grandparents’ Midtown deli Melty’s.
Then the most unexpected thing: Jackie gets recruited for a casting audition for the teen edition of Burn Off!, her favorite competitive cooking show. Even more unexpected, Jackie becomes a contestant.
Jackie is thrown headfirst into the cutthroat competitive TV show world filled with psych outs, picky mom critiques, and dreaded microaggressions to lean into her heritage.
All Jackie wants to do is cook her way. But is her way to cook traditional French cuisine? Lean into her heritage? Or is it something more? To advance through the competition, Jackie must prove who she is on and off the plate.
Jackie Oh herself just didn’t work for me. I didn’t like her much at all. She had the whole I’m-a-special-snowflake mentality—but God forbid anyone treat her like a special snowflake—just let her do whatever she wants, already. It was perfectly fine for Jackie to judge everyone around her based strictly on appearances, but when someone dared judge her? Then they were narrow-minded, ignorant, and racist. While the things Jackie was so against are real issues, she was unlikable enough to make me skim over them.
The only reason I kept reading this was because of the food. Not all the food, but Jackie’s menus sounded fascinating and tasty, and I liked how she eventually got her act together and showcased the different cultures she was surrounded by. The ending was a total dud, as there was no resolution, merely a transcript of a social media posting. As a reader, I feel like the author broke my trust by leaving this story without a resolution.
Patricia Park is from Queens. What’s Eating Jackie Oh? is her newest novel.
(Galley courtesy of Random House Children’s in exchange for an honest review.)
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