Book Title: I Leave It Up to You
Author: Jinwoo Chong
Publisher: Ballantine / Random House (US), Scribe (UK, AUS & NZ)
Publication Date: March 2025
Looking back at the peak pandemic periods, it seemed inevitable that we’d be met with a deluge of the “pandemic novels,” works that would reflect on the era of masks, lockdown, grief, and medical anxiety. Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here was a take on the lockdown, with the intended effect of heartbreak. Still, while sadness and tragedy are obvious choices for pandemic stories, some of the best books in this sub-genre were never destined to be literal recreations of our moment. The ones that would endure would need to find a form oblique enough, strange enough, to capture what could not be directly articulated.
Jinwoo Chong’s I Leave It Up to You provides us with the blueprint for exactly that novel.
It was so easy to lie to family. I wasn’t talking about the little fibs, the inconsequential cover-ups—yes, I took the garbage out, I don’t know why it’s still blocking the garage door; yes, I did my homework, it’s in my bag. No, I was talking about the ugly things one could just pretend didn’t exist, the painful things, the embarrassing things that people could just collectively agree never to bring up. We’ll say it was to keep the family together. Some secrets were worth keeping.
Instead of retracing the pandemic moment directly, it builds a premise that feels both absurd and eerily familiar: Jack Jr., the protagonist, falls into a coma at the end of 2019 after an unexplained accident, and wakes up nearly two years later in 2021. He has, quite literally, slept through the upheaval that upended the world. In giving form to that fleeting thought many of us had — wake me up when it’s over — Chong delivers a novel that delights in the strangeness of its own conceit while grounding it in humour, family, and grief.
It’s a meditation on rupture and return, family and estrangement, the humour that sidles up against grief, and the absurdities of survival.
The Opening: Humour in the Absurd
The opening scene, where Jack unexpectedly stirs into consciousness after two years, sending the attending nurse into panic, sets the tone for the charming novel in Chong’s chameleonic humour. From there, we are whirled into his world of comic misunderstandings about who in his life is still present, his confusion and burden at his survival, and his interpersonal dynamics with his family members.
I was trying in my diminished capacity to stay friends with my male nurse, because he had the answers to my questions and was only just now getting over what appeared to be a nervous breakdown.
Compliments are due to Chong’s command of pacing. Each chapter does the heavy lifting for the next: unspooling plot and emotion in tandem, carrying mystery without coyness. For a literary novel, it is strikingly propulsive; it is difficult to set aside once begun.
Much of that propulsion comes from the ensemble. Jack’s brother, James and his wife, Noa, their Appa and Umma, and the family restaurant, Joja, whom I also see as a character. Emil Cuddy, the nurse who attended to him through his comatose state. Zeno the teenager who arrives at Joja in search of work. Ren, Jack’s boyfriend before the coma, who embodies one of the book’s most poignant threads: what happens when time moves on without you. But it is Juno, Jack’s nephew, who steals scenes — his viral TikTok dubbing Jack “Fish Daddy” propels the family into brief internet notoriety, giving levity and bite to the novel’s exploration of grief and identity.
I’d never quite been looked at the way he looked at me. A mixture of fascination and fear, as though he was admitting he was at a complete loss about what I was going to do next. The way I’d imagine conservationists observed animals in the wild, the brief moment in which the thing they’d devoted their lives to had made itself known and they were in the middle of realizing that their training, all of their studying, had not prepared them for the sight of the real thing. He’d looked at me the same way the night I woke up and, it seemed, had yet to stop.
Food is a quiet but persistent presence here, a language of memory and survival. The novel often recalls Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart, where cooking becomes a bridge across loss and strained family ties. But I Leave It Up to You also has shades of Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You — not in tone so much as in structure: an ensemble unfurling petal by petal, their conflicts and closures emerging scene by scene.
A smorgasbord of emotions
What elevates Chong’s novel is its refusal to lean too hard on any single register. Medical trauma is present but not dwelt upon. Cultural identity is acknowledged with humour and nuance, never as tokenism. Literary fiction often risks either opacity or evasiveness, but Chong sidesteps these traps. It delivers closure without succumbing to sentimentality. Here, there is payoff: relationships arc, threads find closure, even as some unrelieved ambiguities lurk. The result is a novel that is confident in its breadth, playful in its absurdities, and generous with its reader.
There was nothing worse than a Sunday. Nothing worse than having to stop working and be a person, when there were so many things wrong with that faction of life! Take me back to simplicity, the good side, where things made sense.
There is, at the heart of I Leave It Up to You, something subversively familiar. It borrows the scaffolding of the classic “return home” story: a character comes back to a place they thought they had outgrown, confronts unresolved relationships, and finds renewed meaning in the ordinary, their second chance. But the novel never settles into cliché. Its uniqueness of premise keeps it from feeling like a retread. Instead, it refreshes the trope, showing how even familiar structures can yield something strange and new when filtered through a confident, playful imagination.
I Leave It Up to You is the rare pandemic novel that doesn’t feel bound to its time. Subversive in form, satisfying in resolution, it offers both depth and readability. It’s the sort of book that leaves you eager to discuss it with others — an ideal book club pick. In giving shape to the fantasy of sleeping through crisis, Chong has written a book that lingers — absurd, generous, confident, and quietly moving.