A Review of Free Food For Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

After I read it, I felt this book was about me. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

WARNING: Spoilers Ahead!

I started reading Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee in late May 2025, not expecting that it would become one of the most impactful books I’ve read in recent years. It follows Casey Han, a dead-broke Princeton graduate navigating post-college life in New York City, too proud to accept help from the investment bankers and real estate moguls who surround her. Sections of the book spotlight her obedient younger sister Tina and her traditional (and repressed) parents Joseph and Leah. Through it all, she seeks herself. Observant as she may be as to the neediness and insecurities of others, she struggles to overcome her own hubris and restraints. 

1. The Mind Of A Young Adult

Sensual energy permeates the novel. So much of the narration dwells on what people look like, what they wear, how their bodies move — and that’s how we know that Casey is constantly thinking about these things. Like me! 

But Casey comes from a conservative Christian family, and that changes everything. I relate most to her younger sister Tina. She’s a darling who has it all, yet looks up to her older sister’s plucky, brazen tongue and liberal experiences (e.g. sex and smoking—the taboos of Korean Christian families). Casey, by contrast, is already worldly, with a long list of sexual partners and a sharp instinct for desire. But even she isn’t immune to doubt: toward the end of the novel, she’s faced with the existential sexual question: “What is sex even for?”

From casual sex to accepting financial handouts, the perennially conflicted Casey will always feel anger toward others who get away with taking shortcuts and yet seem untouched by shame. Last October, I felt that too, when my final semester of college brought my repressed sexual curiosity to the fore. (I called it my Older Brother Era. I feel it less so now; perhaps I’m in my Younger Brother Era. Are we so destined to gyrate between these all our lives?) Casey and I are united in our prideful fury: a disdain for people who aren’t as thoughtful in charting their lives and ideals, which masks a subtle jealousy: well, they don’t have to; they get to not do that.

2. Crushed

The book is the sigh escaping from the lips of Christian Tradition as it is crushed, flattened by the liberality of the Northeast. Sure, these ideas are dated, and maybe even priggish—soon to be shared by no one (or so it feels)—but witnessing their death still hurts me like it’s my own death.

Casey’s friend Ella is lamblike, the perfect Korean Christian girl. But if her purity is beautiful, it is also tragically exploitable. Her investment banker husband Ted coerces her into premarital sex by playing on her innocent curiosity (“Don’t you want to get to know me better?”). Later, he falls in love with another woman. This shatters her: she never imagined she hadn’t been the only one in his heart. The betrayal is not just emotional but ideological.

This same manipulation reappears later, in even crueler form, when Leah—Casey’s own mother—is seduced by Charles, a known serial adulterer. It’s horrifying because Leah is supposed to be the moral center of the family, the steadfast believer. But her repression and loneliness, long cultivated by her role as a devoted and self-denying wife, becomes the very thing that makes her fall possible.

3. Emotional Honesty Is Not Actually The Moral

For a book so rife with outbursts (mostly Casey’s), Free Food for Millionaires is most poignant in its silences. Most of the time, we are led to consider how things would be So Much Better if the characters just spoke their minds, particularly of how much they care for one another. “Stop hiding to save face! Accept the help––they love you!” The reader cries. But one episode speaks to the contrary.

Leah, Casey’s mother, carries feelings for Charles—yes, that Charles, the serial adulterer. Naturally, she represses them under the immense weight of her faith and conservatism. But their silence cuts especially deep, because this time, Charles really loves her, too. (Gu Seung-Jun type shit, if you’ve watched Crash Landing On You.) 

And yet—nothing happens. After their encounter, there is no confession, no second-chance elopement into a world of their shared love for music. The story tempts us to imagine what could have been if they had just spoken honestly, and then refuses that fantasy. It shows us that this guarded, pleasantries-and-lies-ridden arrangement is not a failure of courage but a reflection of who they are, and the world they inhabit. Somehow this experience rings true. There was never going to be another ending.

(Author’s Note: Having had a similar experience myself, I felt redeemed.) 

4. A Note on Narrative Style

While staying in the third person, the book’s narration flits between the characters. Even within the same conversation, the frame shifts: now I’m inside Casey’s eyes and heart and worldview, then her father’s, then back again. This constant repositioning offers multiple, internally consistent but mutually contradictory truths at once. (It’s given me more empathy for other perspectives. For example, maybe my mom really does believe in her own alien version of Christianity, and maybe she isn’t a gaslight that constantly cherry-picks Bible verses to control me.) Free Food for Millionaires offers no easy adjudications, and has invited me to see the same. 

Conclusion

The ending of Free Food for Millionaires actually didn’t land for me. Some characters seem to regress: Casey repeats her pattern of rejecting a choice you worked hard to obtain because you realize that you don’t want it as much as others want it for you. Other characters get too-easy resolutions: Ella ends up with the perfect white guy who's always loved her (and Finally Speaks Up––cue my point #3), and Charles is reduced to a cartoon villain by the final pages. 

Nonetheless, my disappointment with the ending only accentuates how much affinity I felt toward the story otherwise; indeed, toward Casey herself. When Casey finally gives in to Hugh (the hot guy at work and a veritable devil), she joins a long list of characters unfaithful to their partners. But she is unlike the others: the moment she gets home, she surprises even herself by confessing the truth to her boyfriend Unu. Ashamed, she moves out that same night, leaving most of her possessions behind.

For its confused morality, emotional evasions and thymotic defiance, I have bestowed it the coveted rank of Horcrux, awarded to only about five books in my entire life. I’ll give it to friends, family, and a future partner, hoping they’ll see me in it.¹

Yay for audiobooks!

1. I’m planning to buy a copy as a parting gift for this tsundere at my workplace since she’s leaving at the start of next month :3