Free Food for Millionaires: A Novel

From AudioFile\nWhen the listener learns that Korean-American Casey Han carries a copy of George Eliots MIDDLEMARCH around in her bag, it become clear that this is more than chick lit about a career girl in the big city. Suddenly, the jobs, clothes, and lifestyle Casey craves represent issues of class and assimilation. Shelly Frasiers adept reading of this thoughtful audiobook eloquently raises questions about American social strata much in the way Eliots work did in nineteenth-century England. Casey is a well-educated girl from a modest immigrant family who is constantly aware of the cultural differences that comprise her life. Frasier keeps Casey honest with her no-nonsense performance. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine\nCasey Han's four years at Princeton gave her many things, "But no job and a number of bad habits." Casey's parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold on to their culture and their identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into rarified American society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As she navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives around her, culminating in a portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots. Free Food for Millionaires offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by nineteenth-century novels such as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one's identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.