Reading about Asian families and food have both become pet topics for me in the past few years, so obviously Soy Sauce For Beginners was a no brainer.

It’s a fun book, which my love for Crazy Rich Asians primed me for. Gretchen Lin grew up in her family’s soy sauce factory in Singapore but followed her mother’s plan to move to move to the States and pursue academia instead. This lead to a marriage that has recently fallen apart, and a feeling of disconnection and frustration.

So Gretchen comes home and starts to work for the family bussiness. She brings a college friend in too, she forms a rivalry with a cousin, she has a bad for her no strings attached relationship, she meditates on her parents’ marriage, it’s happiness and unhappiness, she revitalizes the business.

It’s a good book, quick, easy to read and lovely. Not much to analyze, it’s straightforward fun and breezy. I’d read more about this world if Chen wrote more, or another world she felt like inventing.

Up next is The Memoir Club by Laura Kalpakian, because that’s the kind of reading club I’d want to be in.