This book was beautiful. Green Frog hit me close to my heart because while I didn't die I had cancer. She wrote stories about religion, motherhood, marriage & family and more. Some of them I loved more than others, but the one i didn't like was the dolls. I know the dolls were "good" but dolls are a fear of mine.

Because of that doll story I wont rate it high. If there hadn't been such a triggering story then it would have been a 5 star.

Due to health issues cannot write a proper review now even if I enjoyed this book. as it's well plotted, fascinating world building, and thought provoking . I liked the good storytelling
A more extensive review will follow
Recommended.Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Beginning to end Chung managed to bring us a set of astonishing stories with elements of sci-fi and magical realism. Each story presents a different aspect of womanhood using fantastical elements and Korean folktale influences. I was hooked from the very beginning with the story in the form of a recipe instructions called 'How to eat your own heart'. All 14 stories after that were equally absurd, twisted and capturing.
I would recommend this collection, especially to reader who like their 'weird girl' reads.

Huge thanks to Netgalley and @panmacmillan for the advanced digital copy of Gina Chung's short story collection 'Green Frog'.

I wasn't familiar with Gina Chung's previous work, but it's safe to say she gained a new fan with this one.
As a lover of short story collections, 'Green Frog' hit all the right spots for me.

'Green Frog' is a collection of 15 ambitious and intriguing short stories in different genres. The author takes very real stories and human experiences like dealing with the loss of a parent, unexpected pregnancy and dysfunctional familial relationships, and sprinkles them with a bit of magical realism, speculative fiction and Korean mythology.

Just like with every other short story collection, there's stories I loved and stories that didn't impress me as much.
What I will say is that every story in this collection stands out in its own unique way.

My thanks to Net Galley and Pan Macmillan for a free eARC of "Green Frog" by Gina Chung.
This speculative short story collection focused on the immigrant and female in a patriarchal world experiences.
The Korean influences in a own voices rendition felt both as a revelation in some points and universal in others.
My favorite short story was the first one from the collection "How to Eat Your Own Heart".

Another great read by Gina Chung. This is an exploration of a range of emotions through creative stories. Not every story in here worked for me, as is usually the case for collections, but a majority of them were at least four stars. They were unique and not something I’ve ever seen before.

My favourite was probably Human Hearts, but they all had something special about them. I loved that Human Hearts sent a message to the readers about taking control over your own narrative, something that felt especially powerful for me.

I have a feeling I’ll never dislike anything this author has written.

3.75 stars
🌕🌕🌕🌖

🧠 My thoughts
The short stories collection was pretty nice to read. Each of the stories felt like having its own personality. Here are the stories that I liked the most or left the biggest impression on me.

How To Eat Your Own Heart
A condensed description of how sometimes heartbreaking can literally feel in plain words. The story was masterfully written in a way that reminded me of how my broken heart felt when I was a teenager or even later when I was a young adult. The metaphor was so vivid and real.

Presence
A mysterious, sci-fi tale about grief. Reminds me very much of an episode from Black Mirror without a dark twist.

“Pain isn’t always a bad thing. It’s there because it wants to tell us something.” - Masseuse Woman

Human Hearts
A fantastic fantasy story about being strong and in charge of one’s fate regardless of their background.

The Sound of Water
A simple but meaningful family story. I have always been thinking about this thing that people say nowadays that you should live your life and don’t care too much about what your parents want you to do. That’s correct in a way but this story helps me to also think broader than that.

Thanks NetGalley, Pan Macmillan publisher, and the authors for a great advance copy of the book in exchange for my honest review!

"offbeat, scintillating stories influenced by Korean fairy tales and contemporary life,"
This collection of short stories is a captivating mix of fantasy and real-life themes. It explores family dynamics, grief, motherhood, and growing up through a diverse range of characters.
I really did love each short story, which is rare for me!

Actual Rating: 3.5 stars

Teeming with lush imagery and diverse characters, Green Frog is a collection of 15 short stories that contain universal emotions and situations that will resonate with its audience, regardless that it’s centred around being Korean American.

The collection starts with ‘How to Eat Your Own Heart‘, a step-by-step recipe of sorts for those seeking to do as the short story’s title states (please never actually do this or take it literally). It’s a visceral and raw piece, which I imagine is about acknowledging your past, finally leaving it behind so you can heal, be reborn and face the next chapter of your life.

Following it is the titular ‘Green Frog‘, which follows a daughter dealing with the grief of losing her mother, someone who is a fundamental part of her identity and who likened her to the mischievous green frog from a Korean folktale. As she reconsiders this connection, she finally feels that she is at a place where she can move on from that grief and it doesn’t feel wrong to feel that way too.

‘After the Party‘ tells the story of a wife who faces the gradual, inevitable loss of one’s identity as they become more and more a part of another’s instead. Like, how someone is called another’s spouse more often than their name or how they’re known as someone’s child or parent. And, there’s nothing much you can do about this eventual loss but fight it tooth and nail in your own ways because there is and should be more than meets the eye, always.

The fourth piece in this collection is ‘Rabbit Heart‘ wherein a young girl connects and reconnects with her Korean grandmother. It’s about how a distant relative can make you feel so accepted, so comfortable and at home yet they leave in what feels like the blink of an eye because they could be the right person you need in your life but it’s the wrong time.

Next is ‘Presence‘ where we’re reminded that “[p]ain isn’t always a bad thing” because “it wants to tell us something”. It’s a story of the importance of memories as they make us whole, no matter how painful or bright, welcomed or unwelcomed they are because, in their absence, we feel their ghosts but know not of what exactly haunts us.

‘Human Hearts‘ is the sixth piece and it follows a cowardly kumiho whose mother wishes her to be the one who’s dead instead of her beautiful sister. On her mother’s orders, she attempts to enact revenge on the one who killed her sister but is unable to, realising that humans are like kumihos because they too, have their own families, agendas, feelings and prejudices.

The oddest short story of the bunch is ‘Mantis‘ which unfolds from the perspective of a femme fatale-like praying mantis. This praying mantis has always gone after what she desires but has now arrived at a point where she no longer finds joy in it. Sadly, as she learns moderation and starts to feel like she will find joy again, it comes to an abrupt halt.

After that, we have ‘The Sound of Water‘. Here, we read a story told from the perspective of a guy who has had a crush on his older brother’s ex-girlfriend forever. It’s a story about living life despite it being far from what you thought it’d be, about how we’re always swimming, trying to stay afloat to the best of our abilities and remembering that everyone has only lived their life once, thus no one has it all figured out even if they look like they do.

As the ninth piece in this collection, ‘Attachment Processes‘ is another short story that deals with grief from losing a loved one. This time, a mother has lost her daughter so to cope with this loss and potentially heal and move on from it, she enlists the help of technology to bring her daughter back at an age much younger than the one she died. It’s a straightforward story about the complicatedness of motherhood, of how parents are touted as heroes and all-knowing but at the end of the day, they’re humans learning as time moves along too.

‘The Arrow‘ is the one that has left the greatest impression on me. It follows a lady with an unplanned pregnancy. As she decides to keep the baby even though she doesn’t know who the father is, she receives help from her mother whose love she has always yearned to have yet is also someone she resents. It mirrors the reality of some Asian parents who are allergic to showing affection in conventional ways and are instead, rude, gruff, unforgiving, etc. So, when the narrator finally understood what her mum’s version of caring was — when her mother finally showed it openly and in an easily understandable manner, it made me cry.

Unfortunately, ‘Names for Fireflies‘ failed to continue this momentum of striking a chord in me. As a tale about a first love lost without realising it was lost then, it’s strongly tell instead of show, resulting in shallow emotions and zero impact.

‘Honey and Sun‘ was better, though still emotionally shallow. It’s a piece about how everyone initially grows up as their own person only to be confined by societal norms later, thus the resultant yearning to be free despite it all. While some, like the sisters in this tale, do manage to achieve this freedom, others don’t. Instead, they are merely witnesses to the flurry of butterflies where a flap of their wings can cause a hurricane.

The thirteenth piece is ‘You’ll Never Know How Much I Loved You‘ and it is as sad as its title implies. Despite her grandmother’s precious advice (“Listen to me. In this life, you must be your own prize, and then no one can take that away from you.”), Jiyeon finds that she’s unable to follow it for she’s not as strong or brave as wished. Having been in the shadows of everyone — including herself — deemed and viewed as better than her all her life, it is only by keeping quiet and clutching the cracks together that she can stay whole as an unwanted prize.

The second last piece in this collection is ‘The Fruits of Sin‘ which features the elderly Asian aunties we all know and love. These noisy ahjummas are all in the same church and it’s there that they can observe the unplanned teen pregnancy of reverend’s daughter. In the beginning, they’re judgemental of Sora, unable to understand why such a brilliant girl could do something like this. However, as the story progresses, they acknowledge that people aren’t perfect and are rightfully outraged that it was the pastor who impregnated the girl, becoming a great source of support for Sora despite their gossiping and all.

Finally, to round off this collection is ‘The Love Song of the Mexican Free-Tailed Bat’. Although the narrator and her father weren’t on great terms, she is still the only one willing to travel back to Texas to pack up and clear his home after his passing. While doing so, she realises various similarities between her father and the bats he loved — some bad, some sad because bats and humans aren’t the same. Nevertheless, it’s clear that similar to how a bat could be earnestly liked by some and hated by others, her father was disliked as a husband and father, but adored as a mentor.

Overall, Green Frog is an exploration of grief, strength, identity, existence and relationships through distinct short stories of various genres. Many of the short stories felt slightly emotionally stunted to me, but I did enjoy the poignancy they held and the gorgeous imagery the author employed.

While not normally gravitating to a book of short stories, I really, really enjoyed this. After reading Sea Change last year, Gina Chung's debut novel, and loving Chung's writing, I knew this would be superb too. However, I was not prepared to be floored and unable to put it down.

Chung's Green Frog stories are a combination of different genres, different emotions, and different characters, but they all relate back to being Korean. All of them also relate back to being female, except for one story, The Sound of Water, which had a male narrator. I enjoyed the mix up though, because the emotions portrayed by Justin, as well as the lesson learned, is something everyone in life 1. feels, and 2. must learn for themselves. It was a nice change of pace having a male narrator.

My favorite of all of the stories was Human Hearts, a story about a mother and daughter who are half human, half kumiho. They have yellow eyes and nine tails, and they live in the forest mountains beyond the city filled with humans. While they can technically live safely and happily in the woods without human interference, they must consume a human heart every so often, and that's exactly what "Mija" plans to do to avenge her sister, who a human recently killed, by morphing into a human and disguising herself before she goes in for the kill.

I really enjoyed the continuity of the mother daughter relationships that arose, as well as other family relationships (twins, twins and uncle, daughter and father, daughter and brother). It shows a more realistic relationship between family members than most books do, which ultimately made me feel like Chung took a majority of these stories from *real life* families. While sometimes uncomfortable, it felt more real.

4 stars! I loved it & didn't want the stories to end!

Thank you to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for providing me with an copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

4.5. stars

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

I read and really enjoyed Gina Chung's debut Sea Change last year, so I was excited to be approved for her latest offering. And I'm happy to say that this short story collection did not disappoint! Chung spans a sizeable range of genres and subject matter, from fantasy and fable-esque stories, family dramas rooted in reality, and speculative fiction with robots and wild technology.

Despite not being a massive sci-fi reader, the two primarily sci-fi focused stories were probably some of my favourites. Attachment Processes follows a young couple mourning the death of their daughter who decide to try out a new technology which gives you back the person you lost at a determined age - but they'll never age out of that age. Then there's Presence, which follows a disgraced scientist after she took the fall for a scandal at her company which offered memory tech. Users could choose to upload memories to a cloud, offloading traumatic memories from their brains. But there's a clear warning about the potential dangers such technology could have, how facing up to our less-pleasant memories forms us as people.

Of course, I also love a family drama and there were plenty which focused on mother-daughter relationships and romantic ones, in varying stages of disintegration. The Arrow was desperately sad - a mother and daughter who had never been close come together when the daughter accidentally falls pregnant. But their budding new relationship soon comes to an abrupt end. Other stories tackle the Asian-American immigrant experience, parental expectations, the challenges of interracial relationships, mental health, religious hypocrisy, grief, second chances - honestly so much!

A wide-ranging collection, beautifully written, that I'd definitely recommend!

A great short story collection that revolves around Korean American experience from the perspective of the women, their relationships, and the inevitable expectation of sacrifice, loss and heartbreak. Some are very much set in the mundane yet others break away into the magical realism territory offering a much needed relief between serious and cheery.

I recommend if like me you like a book for commuting with!

Thank you Netgalley & Pan Macmillan for the e-arc.

Green Frog by Gina Chung
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4 stars
Publication date: 6 June 2024
Thank you to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for providing me with an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

A short story collection that explores Korean American womanhood, bodies, animals, and transformation as a means of survival.

The first couple of stories didn't really grab me, but oh my goodness, did the rest of this collection absolutely deliver!
All the stories focus on the various experiences of Korean American women (mostly...) and their relationships, whether it is with husbands, parents or children. It's about expectations, the (sometimes) fraught ties to family, sacrifice, loss and heartbreak.
A few of the stories were more on the speculative side, or even magical realism, and were probably my favourites - Presence, Attachment Processes, Honey and Sun. This being said, The Fruits of the Sin and The Arrow were fully rooted in reality and were both raw, compelling and outstanding.
I loved the writing throughout and I will definitely seek out more from this author.
Also, I know that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but this one has to be one of my favourite covers ever!

*I was gifted a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*

This was an interesting collection of short stories, with a mix of fantastical and real-life themes. Family relationships, grief, motherhood and growing up were all explored within this, with a wide range of characters coming to life despite the short word count.

Like with most short story collections, I didn’t connect with all of the stories, though they were quite a few that really resonated with me. My favourites were the ones which focused on human experiences and relationships, showing emotional snapshots of the small moments which become the strongest memories.

Overall, a solid collection and a writer I’ll definitely be reading more from.

Green Frog is a series of short storied by Korean American author Gina Chung. They are stories of heartbreak, of family, of relationships that draw from Korean mythology, folklore and tradition. Chung sets the tone for this collection right from the first story How to Eat Your Own Heart – which, as the name suggests, is a series of instructions for cooking your heart when it has been pulled from your chest. Many of the stories that follow take and build on this metaphoric image.
Many of the stories focus on fractious relationships between mothers and daughters but Chung explores a range of relationships. The stories are not all contemporary or naturalistic and it is the more speculative ones that seem to work best. Human Hearts s a story told from the perspective of a young Kumiho (nine-tailed fox) who is given a horrible task by her mother. Attachment Process is a science fiction tale in which families can manage their grief by interacting with a robotic simulacrum of a lost child. Mantis is fractured relationship tale told from the perspective of a praying mantis. And Presence also uses a science fiction premise – the ability to remove and store unwanted memories – to explore responses to trauma.
The shift of tone, narrator and style in Green Frog emphasises rather than overplays the connections that Chung is making. Themes of otherness, processing grief, dealing with trauma, fractious relationships particularly between mothers and their daughters but also between partners and further across extended families pervade all of these stories, creating resonances and reflections and bringing them into a thought provoking and satisfying whole.

This is a beautiful book that touches on so many aspects of what it means to be a woman, more specifically, its multifaceted nature: what it means to be a daughter, mother, granddaughter, and so on. It tells the truth about these identities and how it is never easy "just" being a mother, or "just" being a daughter - rather, being a woman is hard in any form. These stories were fabulously written and I really enjoyed this.

In a Nutshell: An astounding collection of speculative fiction with some diverse female characters. Infused with a strong Korean flavour, but with situations and emotions that are universal. A fabulous OwnVoices option for short story lovers, especially those with a fondness for speculative fiction.

This collection of fifteen stories comes with no author’s note. However, the blurb helps us know that this collection of “offbeat, scintillating stories influenced by Korean fairy tales and contemporary ennui, shines a light on womanhood in all of its human (and other) forms.” An intriguing and ambitious theme, met almost perfectly by the stories, which come from varied genres such as speculative fiction, contemporary drama, fantasy, folk lore, and sci-fi.

The author’s imagination is powerful, as is her exploration of emotions. There’s a sense of poignancy underlying most of the stories, though not all the tales are morose. Each of the narratives covers a tangled relationship.

What makes the stories distinct is the approach and the main character. The narrator in the tales covers a diverse spectrum of females, such as a twelve-year-old girl, a mother, a daughter, a kumiho, and even a female praying mantis. The narrative styles are also distinct, with the tales being explored in first person singular, first person plural, second person and third person. Each story felt so fresh and so individual that I never felt any kind of déjà vu while going through this work.

Quite often, an anthology/story collection begins quite strong and then starts getting either dragged or repetitive. This time though, the start of the book was relatively okay for me, partly because of the ‘slice of life’ storytelling style. As I began to wonder if this book would take a nosedive, the stories took a strong turn upwards, and stayed there right till the end. I am so glad I persisted, because this ended up being one of the most creative anthologies I have read this year.

The endings are mostly satisfying, but more importantly, they make perfect sense for their respective storylines without feeling forced. Only a couple of the endings felt abrupt to me.

As always, I rated the stories individually, Of the fifteen stories, a whopping eleven stories reached or crossed the 4 star mark. The remaining four stories scored 3.5 stars. What a performance!

As I don’t want to pen a lengthy list of top rankers, here are my favourites, with 4.5+ stars:

🐸 Rabbit Heart - Generational complexities explored in this poignant tale about parental connections. Love how it handles emotions. - ⭐⭐⭐⭐✨
🐸 Human Hearts - A story of revenge and love and human hearts and not-so-human hearts, made all the more special by the narrator, a kumiho (the nine-tailed fox from Japanese mythology.) - ⭐⭐⭐⭐✨
🐸 Mantis - A love story gone wrong. What's special about that, you ask? The narrator is a female praying mantis. 😉 I always love atypical narrators when voiced right. - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🐸 Attachment Processes - Don't want to reveal any content spoilers about this one, but it has a thought-provoking concept that generates awe, sadness and apprehension all at once. - ⭐⭐⭐⭐✨
🐸 The Arrow - A poignant story in second person, about how a life-altering event changes a relationship. Love the exploration of emotions in this bittersweet narrative. - ⭐⭐⭐⭐✨
🐸 The Fruits of Sin - Remember the biblical verse, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"? This is a beautiful representation of the practical side of that thought. Loved this to the core! - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Overall, this OwnVoices story collection began as good but ended up outstanding. It will be one of my favourite story collections of 2024.

Strongly recommended to all short story lovers who love to read tales blending reality and fantasy. Don’t expect the typical in these tales, and you will be pleasantly surprised.

4.15 stars, based on the average of my ratings for each tale. (If you are familiar with my ratings, you know that an average that goes to 4 stars and beyond is outstanding for an anthology.)

My thanks to Pan Macmillan, Picador, and NetGalley for the DRC of “Green Frog”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

A lovely read if you’re in the mood for a melancholy tapestry exploring difficult family dynamics, identity, loss and grief, midlife crisis of sorts, searching for - and occasionally finding - yourself.

The stories range from completely realistic to fantastical/absurdist, and the more realistic ones explore what it’s like being Korean American in your thirties, and not in any in-your-face kind of way. It’s just all a natural part of the story. The more fantastical ones lean into myths (like the one about the kumiho) or fairytales (talking dolls and half-sentient butterflies). All of them are introspective, emotional in that somewhat detached, pensive way that is thought-provoking without being shocking or action-packed. In general, Chung’s wistful writing resonated with me, and personally I enjoyed most of the stories in this book.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC.

3.5

Thank you to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for providing me an eARC to review!

After really enjoying Sea Change I was excited to read more from the author, and this was a solid short story collection about family (especially mothers and daughters) and coming-of-age (at any age).

Some of the stories had a touch of magical realism but others are firmly rooted in reality, and since the messages of the stories were all very similar I think this was the perfect length for the collection. Would definitely read more from this author in future!

As you should all know I really like a well-crafted collection of short stories so as soon as this came up on NetGalley I jumped at it.

Gina Chung travels through many different worlds in this collection, but always with the female character central, no matter if it is Sci-Fi, mythological, or domestic situations the women often have moral dilemmas to work through and family is more than likely to be at the centre of it.

The collection plays on Korean myths and behavioural expectations and the weaving through of both these makes for very interesting reading. A spotlight onto a culture like but unlike our own, especially when these two cultures intersect.

There are lots of really strong stories in here but I feel my favourites were the sci-fi based ones, especially about traumatic memories and grief and how there could eventually be technical solutions but at what cost.

Another one I really enjoyed was a tale seen from the perspective of the kumiho who has to revenge her dead sister and her feelings on that and her life.

But I really enjoyed all of them, though the whole collection seemed to riff off a deep melancholy and was quite muted in tone this only heightened the feeling of difference and other.

I received this from NetGalley and Pan Macmillan in exchange for an honest review.