Lily Chu lives in Toronto, Canada, and loves ordering the second-cheapest wine, wearing perfume all the time, and staying up far too late reading a good book. She writes romantic comedies with strong Asian characters. You can find her online at lilychuauthor.com or @lilychuauthor.
Ariadne Hui thrives on routine. So what if everything in her life is planned down to the minute: that's the way she likes it. If she's going to make partner in Toronto's most prestigious law firm, she needs to stay focused at all times. But when she comes home after yet another soul-sucking day to find an unfamiliar, gorgeous man camped out in her living room, focus is the last thing on her mind. Especially when her roommate explains this is her cousin Choi Jihoon, freshly arrived from Seoul to mend a broken heart. He just needs a few weeks to rest and heal; Ari will barely even know he's there. (Yeah, right.) Jihoon is kindness and chaos personified, and it isn't long before she's falling hard. But when one wrong step leads to a shocking truth, Ari finds herself thrust onto the world stage—not as the competent, steely lawyer she's fought so hard to become, but as the mystery woman on the arm of a man the entire world claims to know. now with her heart, her future, and her sense of self on the line, Ari will have to cut through all the pretty lies to find the truth of her relationship...and discover the Ariadne Hui she's finally ready to be.
At first, I was incredibly excited to pick this book up. I really enjoy a good celebrity romance, and after the first one hundred pages, I was curious to see how Ari and Jihoon might make their relationship work. I loved how right off the bat, we knew this story was going to be about more than just romance—Ari clearly has to work through her career exasperations and her hopes for her familial relationships. I am a huge advocate for romance novels that incorporate more than just romance, and it seemed like The Comeback would absolutely fit the bill. However, by the end of the book, I felt like none of these promises were delivered on. I think this can be boiled down to three things: how the celebrity romance was developed, how Ari's relationship with her work evolved, and how her relationship with her sister grew over the course of the novel.
To start, it was incredibly frustrating to see the way the celebrity romance situation was handled. At the beginning, I could forgive Ari's ignorance of Jihoon's fame—she's not into K-pop! She has no idea about that world! That's totally fine, because I relate, and in Ari's shoes, I never would have known Jihoon was a celebrity hiding out from responsibilities. In fact, that throwaway line about Ari turning the news on, hearing about some missing Asian singer, and then turning the news off was hilarious. I enjoyed how Ari's not-knowing allowed Ari and Jihoon to connect at the beginning. While I don't believe one month is truly enough time to make that connection (especially since the one month refrain is repeated over and over again, going to show how insignificantly short one month is), I was ready to put that wariness aside to believe in their once-in-a-lifetime love story.
It's the second half of the book that wrecked my hopes for that. Jihoon and Ari fall into a cyclical narrative, wherein Jihoon consistently doesn't let Ari know the real-life implications of a relationship with him, and where Ari keeps changing her mind about being with him because of those costs, and both of them are upset and angry with one another. Put simply, they have issues communicating with one another about the real-life nature of their relationship. They can't scale a roommate relationship to the real world once Jihoon rejoins his band, and it's frustrating for the reader to watch them not communicate with one another ways to make it work. In particular, the forgiveness they both extend comes quickly (especially with a one-month-relationship foundation), and yet they don't actually take the time to discuss the logistics of their relationship (despite Ari mentioning several times that's what she's stressed about, and despite Jihoon knowing his own world so well that he could have predicted the ending of the novel). All-in-all, it's a very frustrating experience.
Secondly, I was looking forward to seeing how Ari would work out her career worries. Clearly, she works at a place that doesn't value her, despite her stating over and over how she puts work above all else and spends more time working than she does doing anything else. I was excited for her to stick it to her racist colleagues, to quit and pursue her passion for making travel itineraries, but we never really get a defining moment for Ari as she makes this change. We get one throwaway paragraph describing how she quit her job and how she got her new one. While I was definitely excited to see her pursuing her passions, there isn't a larger commentary on how important it is to be happy with our work, or commentary on how difficult it is to leave one line of work and go into a different industry (even though you could argue that Ari doesn't completely switch industries all at once). The one saving grace of this is how at the very least we see Ari and her father developing a relationship outside of her law work—she speaks to him on page and declares what she wants, and he eventually agrees to let her make a travel itinerary for him (and while that still means their relationship hinges on what she does for work, at least it's a step in the right direction since it's what she's happy doing).
Finally, another big promise the novel makes at the beginning is Ari and Phoebe fixing their sisterly bond. It's clear that Phoebe is coming home to be a bigger presence in Ari's life, which Ari is unfamiliar with, since Phoebe left home when Ari was a teenager. Despite Ari having a quite sisterly relationship with her roommate, she chafes against Phoebe's reentrance into her life, unsure how to move forward or if she even wants to. I believe this to be super valid, and can’t imagine the hurt that I would feel if my sister left my life when I was younger. All that being said, I wish Ari had been more open to Phoebe, and more vulnerable with her sister when she couldn't find the courage to be vulnerable with Jihoonn. It seemed to me like Ari had more of a reason to bring Phoebe in, knowing that her father almost died unexpectedly. But, all the way to at least 75% of the way through, Ari is still finding ways to push Phoebe out. I hoped that we could have spent some of the time between Ari's and Jihoon's splits giving Ari and Phoebe space to start working their trauma out, but that doesn't come until much closer to the end, which means it is not as rewarding as it could have been when they finally accept one another in their lives.
All-in-all, this book would have benefitted from a different pacing, instead of trying to cram too much into a timeline that doesn't work for the narrative. I think there's some excellent commentary in here about K-pop and the music industry, and it's definitely a reminder that we are defined by the things we love.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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