Julia Song is Undateable is Susan Lee’s first adult romance and it’s delightful!

Thirty-year-old Julia Song is the CEO of Starlight Enterprises, an American K-beauty brand which is on the brink of break-out success. Julia is single and is being pressured by her Korean mother and grandmother to marry and have a family. When Julia’s grandmother implies that she is dying Julia reluctantly agrees to some community matchmaking.

After unsuccessfully dating through her twenties, Julia sees herself as ‘too much’ and undateable. She’s frank and awkward, as well as being a successful female entrepreneur, and she believes this makes her off-putting. Julia is also super-focused on her business, working hard to expand and get some funding to move into the Korean market.

Tae Kim is a few years younger than Julia and grew up in the same Californian neighbourhood. He he has a long-term crush on her and has tracked her success from a distance. Several years earlier, Tae left college to come home and help his father, who was undergoing cancer treatment, and then, once his dad was in remission, got a job in Chicago – that he hated. Now his father is unwell once more, and Kae has, again, dropped everything to come home to help out – which extends to everyone in the local Korean American community. It becomes clear to the reader – and to Tae – that while he is a caregiver (with a saviour complex), and a practical person, this constant giving has its own problems.

Julia and her best friends grew up Korean American so they understand the tension between their immersion in American life outside the home, and the very traditional Korean life of their parents and earlier generations who actively maintain Korean culture and values.

“It’s our fate. It’s the Korean han, our cultural burden. All Koreans always carry around the shame of somehow not feeling good enough and then putting it onto the generations after them.”

When a slightly drunken Julia tells Tae that she has agreed to three dates organised by her family, Tae jumps at the chance to be her dating coach (Julia loves a coach!). Tae is smitten and alternates between coaching and reassuring her, while still believing himself to be out of her league. The men she dates are ‘successful’ stereotypes (a lawyer, a doctor, a musician) and of course there’s lots of humour in the ways that Julia bumbles through each date.

Julia Song is Undateable is a bit of a trope-fest: fake dating, date coaching, age gap, childhood friends-to-lovers – and that makes it endearingly predictable. Julia and Tae’s internal conflicts are really nothing at all, but even so, I was completely charmed by their dilemmas and the Korean representation, which is nuanced and feels authentic. Julia is awkwardly likeable, Tae is a honey, and their dilemmas have an authenticity because of the cultural overlay of Julia’s family expectations and Tae’s lack of measurable career success. I love that while Julia, as a second generation American, identifies strongly with her Korean background, she doesn’t have a strong grasp of the language or know much about the food outside of what she eats at home. She knows virtually nothing about current Korean music – neither K-Pop nor ‘trot’. Tae, on the other hand, has a much stronger handle on Korean culture and his lessons on all these things are delightful. Julia is neurotic – she’s a vegetarian who doesn’t much like vegetables – and Tae works with her quirks and soothes her anxiety.

Julia and Tae’s romance, while predictable, is lovely and the representation of the Korean diaspora is really well done. Recommended!