Tongue

May 11, 2009
In this plodding, reflective novel, bestselling Korean author Jo's first to be translated into English, a young cook spurned in love works her way out of a depressed stupor and up to an implausible, violent act of revenge. Talented cook Jeong Ji-won and her longtime boyfriend, Han Seok-Ju, run a cooking school together, but after he leaves her for an ex-model, Ji-won falls into a funk and returns to the kitchen at Nove, an Italian restaurant where she had previously worked. There, she gradually restores her confidence in life and with a knife. But circumstances surrounding the death of Seok-Ju's dog lead Ji-won to commit a puzzling and violent act of revenge. The narrative's heavy reliance on reminiscing and ruminations about food shortchanges character development; particularly troubling is how little is revealed about Seok-Ju (we do know, however, that he likes steak), so Ji-won's reasons for wanting him back feel hollow and make her grotesque revenge plan tough to swallow. There's more fat than meat on this one.

June 1, 2009
South Korean bestseller Jo makes her English-language debut with a novel focused on elemental experiences, primarily food and sex.

As narrator Jung Ji-won quickly informs us, the plot is anti-Romantic. Instead of two characters meeting and falling in love, the story begins with the collapse of a relationship. Ji-won and her long-term architect boyfriend have split, because he has taken up with the lovely Lee Se-yeon, a former model. In an understandable funk, Ji-won closes the cooking school she'd been running out of her home and takes refuge in the sous-chef position she'd formerly had at Nove, an Italian restaurant in Seoul. Her tenure had given her several opportunities to travel to Italy, where she"learned how to pair foie gras with baked apple in Tuscany, how to make gelato in Bologna, and assembled pizza margherita in Napoli." As Ji-won slowly begins to rehabilitate herself, food becomes her passion, her escape and, ultimately, her revenge. The separation from her lover is a messy one, however. She gets their dog, Paulie, while her boyfriend basks in the sensual delights of Se-yeon. On the other hand, Ji-won makes abundantly clear the sensual connection between food and love:"The person you can eat with is also the person you can have sex with, and the person you can have sex with is the person you can eat with. That's why dates always start with a meal." While Ji-won is not pleased with having caught her boyfriend in flagrante delicto, what really puts the icing on the proverbial cake is Se-yeon's decision to teach cooking classes. Not only is Se-yeon, as Ji-won acidly notes,"the woman who couldn't differentiate between parsley and mugwort last fall," she's giving those classes in the"perfect" kitchen the boyfriend originally designed for Ji-won. But chefs have subtle ways of extracting their pound of flesh.

A sumptuous feast.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from July 1, 2009
For many, food is a source of comfort. For Korean chef Jung Ji-won, its sanctuary, the place she goes to make sense of the world. Her grandmother taught her to revere the kitchen space, a sentiment she carried with her when she became a chef at Nove, one of her countrys finest Italian restaurants. After several years serving customers, Jung Ji-won, with the help of her lover, Seok-ju, opens a cooking school. She soon has a thriving business, teaching novices and foodies alike the finer points of fine cuisine. Jung Ji-won loves as passionately as she cooks, and for a time, life with Seok-ju is absolute bliss. Then she discovers him in bed with one of her students, and her world falls apart. She finds her way back to sanity, returning to Nove and reveling in foods power to both soothe and seduce. In her first novel to be translated into English, Jo serves up lush, often erotic, descriptions of food certain to have readers aching for a gourmet meal. Her elegant prose is spiked with moments of wry: Slicing turbot in half is an insult to the fish, she cautions, and its rude to have a mediocre cook handle foie gras.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)