Monthly Book Club Review: Lunar Love by Lauren Kung Jessen

As I mentioned in my first blog earlier this month, I joined an in-person romance book club. In truth, it’s really my first one. I tried to join one online two years ago, but it continued to be rescheduled, and I have a very lovely and nontraditional book group chat running with two of my closest friends where we talk about what we’re reading. Sometimes, we even read what one of us highly recommends. I have a few other friends who I talk about books with, individually, which is just as fulfilling. Truly, I cherish each of them, especially since most of them live out of state.

It was important to me to find an activity to do in-person this year - for either my reading or my writing - so you can imagine how thrilled I was to discover a local, more established book club at one of my libraries. 

​Quick shout-out to all the libraries and librarians ​out there - please go support your own! I’d love to hear about the classes, programs, or books you find! 

I managed to snag a digital copy of the predetermined January pick: Lunar Love by Lauren Kung Jessen. Her website shares that she is “a Chinese-American writer of rom-coms with lots of food and big feelings.” Truly, an apt description for her debut novel, which just celebrated its second bookaversary this month.

Ironically, the anniversary fell on the day before the book club met! 

After looking into Lauren’s background, I realized how much of herself appeared in this debut. The main character of this book, Olivia Huang Christenson, inherits her family’s Chinese astrology match-making business. Not only is Olivia Chinese-American… 

So is the main love interest, Bennett O’Brien! 

In addition to her cultural background, other aspects of Lauren’s life appear prominently in this book. Her experience with cooking and Big Tech, her interests in how tradition evolves over time, and even how she met her husband—online dating, of all ways.

If anything, the story and characters resonated in this book. I choked up (okay: cried) more than once. Truth be told, when I read a certain plot point toward the end, I remembered why I wrote the book I did in 2015. How much of myself I wrote into that unpublished piece. 

Unexpectedly, I walked away from Lunar Love feeling raw and inspired again. Renewed, even.

While I revealed Olivia’s career above, I won’t speak on Bennett’s role in the story to avoid spoilers… But trust me when I say, this leading couple venn-diagrams beautifully. Where they intersect, where they diverge. It’s a delicious friction, sometimes fraught and other times flirty. As characters, they were 3D from the very beginning. More than that, the circumstances of their interactions marries cultural tradition with modern progress in a way that invites readers to engage each, both individually and as one.

For me, this thematically worked for the romantic nature of the book. The blend of their unique character worldviews, their careers and aspirations, their familial backgrounds, their astrological signs… These characters are complex, and because of that, I still think of them weeks after my book club discussed it.

As a book club, we were pleased by how the characters met, how even that initial rom-com meet-cute convention defied our expectations for their roles in the story, the insertion of a plot twist in the first third of the novel that resolved a classic (albeit sometimes frustrating) plot device in romance books, and unanimously adored the ending - plot twists and all.

Some of my fellow book clubbers expressed dislike for Olivia’s initial character behavior, but we ended up having a wonderful conversation about how that set up the perfect foundation for her growth through the last third of the book. Even moments we didn’t necessarily want to happen had to happen so that happily-ever-after was earned.

And what an emotional payoff it was.

Lauren has two other books: Red String Theory, published last January, and Yin Yang Love Song, which publishes tomorrow! If any of her three books pique your interest, I recommend grabbing a copy. Her writing is lovely. I hope to read more of her work this year. 

Well, that’s it for now. I’ve received the librarian’s book assignments for the next few months. February features A Heart of Blood and Ashes by Milla Vane, so expect a review on that sometime next month. I’ve never heard of it - or any of the other books planned this spring - so I'm uncertain what to expect based on the description. I've read plenty of fantasy romances and/or romantic fantasies these last few years, but you never really know what you're in for until you crack the book open. 

But what's not to love about the prospect of another inked adventure?

Until next time!