Praise for Pool House

"Choi’s story is both ethereal and unexpectedly perilous."
—The New York Times

"Culturally incisive and relentlessly smart, Pool House is like Grey Gardens set against the tarnished glitz of the Hollywood C-list. It’s time we recognize Mary H.K. Choi as an auteur."
—Michelle Zauner, New York Times bestselling author of Crying in H Mart

"Pool House is a sharp, hilarious, unsparing mother-daughter story. Mary H.K. Choi speaks everything that normally goes unspoken, treating wealth, celebrity, even grief with the merciless yet affectionate point-of-view of a family member—ruthlessly ribbing one moment, and shattering your heart in the next. This book, like its author, is something very special."
—Rachel Khong, New York Times bestselling author of Real Americans

"Choi's prose is unflinching, dynamic, effervescent, and expansive—Pool House is a magnum opus and a vibe. With delight and melancholy, Choi stretches questions of care, family, and becoming to their outer limits—the novel is a gem of honesty and clarity amidst the messiness of being a person among other people. Choi continues to astound and Pool House is a wonder."
—Bryan Washington, author of Palaver

"Smart and stylish, Pool House is a fast-moving story of grief, fame, and the mess and meaning of family, told with Choi’s trademark wit and insight."
—Lisa Ko, award-winning author of Memory Piece

"Mary H.K. Choi’s Pool House is a deep full-bodied dive into joy. Her clarity, precision, and deep understanding [of the bond] between mothers and daughters [will] leave you underlining whole paragraphs with a trembling hand and calling your best friend to read them aloud. What a sparkling, astonishing novel!"
—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk

"The detail and specificity is overwhelming and gorgeous, and it builds to the best possible kind of ending, which is one that I wasn’t sitting there anticipating but as soon as it happened, I knew it was the only possible ending. It’s just a great, great book."
—Linda Holmes, bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over

"Choi offers an evocative study of Hollywood in all its seediness and self-importance...An impressive portrait of an ephemeral and savage world."
—Kirkus (starred review)

“An exquisite mess of mommy issues.”
—Interview Magazine

"This gimlet-eyed family drama has plenty of bite."
—Publisher's Weekly

“Stevie, Moon, and Adam aren’t particularly likable characters. In fact, there’s much about Pool House that is purposefully ugly, even painful, written as if poking a wound to see if it oozes… And yet, keeping their company for the duration of the novel is a powerful thing.”
—Elle Magazine

"Isn't it bliss when a novel that is billed as a perfect summer book actually turns out to be one? I'm not sure just yet what the song of the summer is, but the book of the summer is Pool House."
—Maris Kreizman, author of I Want to Burn This Place Down

"Mary H.K. Choi is just my kind of stylist. Pool House is both wickedly funny and achingly tender: a wild ride through ill-conceived sex, real estate purchases and the nightmare of family, and set against the backdrop of LA and NYC. Drastically modern and searingly contemplative of how we live now, Pool House is superb"
—Naomi Wood, author of Mrs Hemingway

"What a book. It’s been glittering and pulsing in my mind since I finished it . . . I love books that give you the real, unsantised version of things; feelings that are so gross and unacceptable and relatable; the things that happen within relationships that are clinically insane and also completely normal; the officially heinous, unforgivable behaviour that you kind of have every sympathy for . . . Pool House has all of that and more. The places (LA, the eponymous pool house, wealthy New York) are so viscerally depicted I can still smell them and the writing is so sharply accurate and often so wrongly, darkly hilarious line by line that I kept double taking. And the mother-daughter relationship…oh my god. The tension, the suffocation, the symbiosis, the love, the way too much, the so not enough… if something can be traumatic in a good way, this was it. I also loved, adored, the depiction of Asian women in a western country – so many familiarities (both wonderful and awful, but always satisfying to read). This book is a lot. And it’s so, so brilliant."
—Emily Itami, author of Fault Lines

"Choi is known for her well-received trio of young-adult novels, but her latest book proves that she’s just as talented at writing for older audiences...I loved the way Choi deals with themes of aging, class and family with a rare sensitivity; this is a Hollywood novel that will resonate even with readers who don’t have an abiding interest in the entertainment industry." —Michael Schaub, L.A. Times