Book Review: Yolk by Mary H. K. Choi

Jayne has been struggling for a long time. If it wasn’t enough to have a complex relationship with her family and friends, she also has a warped one with her own body, which was one of the first red-flag things I picked up on as I got to know her as our main character. She barely attends fashion school, sailing through New York days and nights with a sinking feeling of repeating behaviours she knows aren’t right, just hoping that people will like her—that they’ll stay—battling demons that resurface from childhood and present day, when her estranged older sister, June, comes back into her orbit.

June has the high-life—an amazing job, incredible apartment, and is doing pretty well for herself money-wise—basically everything that Jayne doesn’t have. But then June is diagnosed with uterine cancer. The sisters with heavy baggage and complicated history come together in a unique, very sisterly way, because June is sick, she needs Jayne, and that changes things—it moves mountains. Even when things get crazier when Jayne finds out something June has been hiding, she knows they need each other. They might not always like one another, but the love runs so much deeper, and they’re finding that, purely, means the most.

Overall, Yolk was somewhat of a masterpiece to me. I ate up the pages with precision and greed, desperately rooting for Jayne and June, for characters that became so vivid to me in those almost-400 pages. I loved that, although powerfully meaningful, the romance within took a backseat to the main message. As a younger sister—the youngest daughter—like Jayne, I felt so many of the same feelings she did, too. The desire to be as smart, to be as liked, to go as far. I also understood that estrangement between them, the rooted absence that twists around a happy childhood and distorts the people they are now. In so many ways that I cannot fully explain, this was an unflinchingly honest and achingly beautiful novel that has changed me forever. I adore Mary’s writing style, even more so for including Jayne-with-a-Y, because that’s my middle name. A bright, beaming five-stars.