Book Cougars Podcast: Two Middle-Aged Women on the Hunt for a Good Read
Sep 22, 2026 · 1 hr 49 min · 6 segments
Welcome to a special MIN JIN LEE triple header to celebrate her new novel, AMERICAN HAGWON. Part 1: We talk about AMERICAN HAGWON in the first part of the episode. The novel publishes on 9/29, and if…
And as I said on a previous episode, I was really shocked at how quickly I read it.
I felt like it was not that Pachinko wasn't accessible, but I felt like sentence by sentence, Pachinko took me a little bit longer to read, whereas Free Food for Millionaires just felt like It felt very familiar and an easy story to sink your teeth into.
And I fell in love with the characters, especially the main character, Casey Hahn, right away.
It's about Casey Hahn, as Emily mentioned, who's a recent graduate from college.
And so her struggle post-graduation is living in the two worlds of her family and being a graduate from an Ivy League college and not really belonging to either world anymore or ever.
In certain instances, one of the boyfriends is the kind of guy who went to exclusive prep school ivy league school and is rolling in the dough now making money at a financial firm this novel is set in the financial industry of manhattan which is a world i know nothing about and another great thing about minna she made that world so real and accessible and still it just blows my mind how With a few strokes, you can feel like you're in some high stakes office sitting around this conference table or in a back room shooting the shit with all these hot shot guys.
And I thought she did a really good job, too, of portraying that male machismo that, you know, happens in a competitive financial environment.
And I loved it also when, I'm always a fan when the title is revealed somewhere in the story.
And that happened as Casey, right as she was entering her work life in this financial sector, I think it was a hedge fund, right? That's what I always pictured it to be.
And as I said on a previous episode, I was really shocked at how quickly I read it.
I felt like it was not that Pachinko wasn't accessible, but I felt like sentence by sentence, Pachinko took me a little bit longer to read, whereas Free Food for Millionaires just felt like It felt very familiar and an easy story to sink your teeth into.
And I fell in love with the characters, especially the main character, Casey Hahn, right away.
It's about Casey Hahn, as Emily mentioned, who's a recent graduate from college.
And so her struggle post-graduation is living in the two worlds of her family and being a graduate from an Ivy League college and not really belonging to either world anymore or ever.
In certain instances, one of the boyfriends is the kind of guy who went to exclusive prep school ivy league school and is rolling in the dough now making money at a financial firm this novel is set in the financial industry of manhattan which is a world i know nothing about and another great thing about minna she made that world so real and accessible and still it just blows my mind how With a few strokes, you can feel like you're in some high stakes office sitting around this conference table or in a back room shooting the shit with all these hot shot guys.
And I thought she did a really good job, too, of portraying that male machismo that, you know, happens in a competitive financial environment.
And I loved it also when, I'm always a fan when the title is revealed somewhere in the story.
And that happened as Casey, right as she was entering her work life in this financial sector, I think it was a hedge fund, right? That's what I always pictured it to be.
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3 of 14
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She explains how abuse can reproduce itself
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