American Han – Lisa Lee

I almost never DNF a book. There's always a part of me that thinks the next chapter might be the one that turns it around. With "American Han," I kept making that bet for about 80 percent of the novel before my next Libby loan arrived and gave me a graceful exit.

Lisa Lee is clearly a talented writer. At her best — specifically in the sections set in the past, tracing the Kim family's roots and the particular pressures of Korean immigrant life in 1960s and '80s America — she writes with the lived-in experience of someone who has thought deeply about what it costs a family to chase the American Dream across generations.

From the model minority myth to social and economic mobility as a slow-acting poison and, finally, the way Korean patriarchy kept her mother locked in an abusive marriage are all rich fodder. When the novel focuses on these topics it is genuinely illuminating. Lee is especially sharp when dissecting the specific biases white Americans extend toward Asian immigrants.

The problem is that the present-day narrative never gave me enough. Jane and her mother are in a state of such sustained, unrelenting antagonism that I stopped being able to understand why Jane kept walking back into it. I'm not looking for warmth — I can handle difficult family portraits — but I needed something between these two women beyond mutual resentment, and Lee never quite provided it. The single POV also worked against the novel; everything we know is filtered through Jane's frustration, which made it hard to build sympathy or connection with anyone else.

A review I'd read framed this as a dark comedy. It is very much not that. It's a heavy, largely humorless drama that alternates between timelines without building much momentum in either. Individual scenes land — particularly anything set in the past — but the novel as a whole felt like a series of vignettes that kept circling the same territory without moving through it. I kept waiting for the story to click into gear. It didn't, at least not before I gave up on it.

There's a version of this novel that would hit me differently if I recognized more of myself in the experiences being described. The cultural specificity that makes "American Han" illuminating to some readers is also what kept me at arm's length. That's not a criticism of Lee so much as an honest accounting of my own limitations as a reader here. What I can say is that the novel never gave me enough of an entry point to bridge that distance, and that's where I think it falls short.

Katharine Chin does genuinely good work in the audiobook, bringing distinct life to the various characters even within the constraints of Jane's singular and often limited perspective. It doesn't fix the novel's structural problems, but it's a more immersive experience than reading would likely be. If you're determined to give this one a try, the audiobook is the way to go.

Rating (story): 2/5 stars

Rating (narration): 3/5 stars

Format: Audiobook (library loan)

Dates read: April 14 – April 18, 2026

Multi-tasking: Encouraged. You may find your attention drifting in the present-day sections, which is not unrelated to the novel's pacing issues.