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👋 Hello readers!👋 We’re reading David Yoon's Frankly in Love this month, a funny, thought-provoking, and emotionally resonant coming-of-age story about Frank Li, a Korean-American teen, navigating his senior year caught between two worlds: the traditional expectations of his Korean parents and his own Southern California upbringing. When Frank falls for a cute, savvy, white girl in his class, he comes up with a plan with family-friend Joy Song to hide his relationship from his parents.
Hit up the first impressions thread in the Facebook group!
🌟 Behind the Book 🌟 We asked David Yoon to tell us a bit about the story behind Frankly in Love. Here's what he had to say.
"When I was in high school, my parents had one simple rule: date Korean. Of course I didn’t, and as a consequence I had to basically keep my love life completely secret from them. In hindsight that was a strange thing to do—to hide such a big part of my life from people so important to me, while my other (usually white) friends freely brought their significant others to dinner, movies, etc. with their respective families.
So at first, I thought it would be classic rom-com fun to have a boy (named Frank) in that situation team up with a girl in a similar bind to fake date each other, thereby appeasing their parents while letting them date whoever they want in secret. But I pretty quickly realized that fake-dating, like any giant lie, is loaded with potential confrontation. Because when Frank’s parents find out about the scheme, there’d be all kinds of serious questions from them, like Why were you going against our wishes? and Why are you hiding things from us? And Frank might counter with questions like Why can’t you let me be me? or What did you expect, coming to America? You can see how this fake-dating deception could be like a bomb exploding the family to expose all kinds of issues of identity, expectation, ambition, and (most important) love in its various forms."
Want to catch up on past BuzzFeed Book Club reads? Pick up My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, or Family Trust by Kathy Wang. đź“–
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