"Grace M. Cho's memoir richly braids Korean meals, memories of a mother fighting racism and the onset of schizophrenia, and references ranging from Christine Blasey Ford's testimony to the essays of Ralph Ellison." --Vanity Fair

"Fascinating." --Ms.

"A deft presentation of an uncertain and critically underserved past. . . . In Tastes Like War, Cho has sent a vital current through a history towards a more considered life, a more felt conception of history as it involves us." --Full Stop

"Somehow both mouthwatering and heartbreaking, Tastes Like War is a potent personal history." --Shelf Awareness

"An exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation." --Booklist, starred review

"A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience." --Kirkus Reviews

"Powered by sharp, unflinching prose, Cho's book is as much about her personal history as it is about the history of American hegemony in Asia -- and the many scars it has left on the millions of people who have experienced it. By chronicling her own relationship with her mother, who struggled with schizophrenia, and many of the foods they shared, Cho offers an incisive portrait of how haunting these conflicts continue to be." --Vox

"Terrific." --Chicago Tribune

"Tastes Like War is a compelling reminder that our lives are connected to and reflect the legacies of collective histories and experiences." --International Examiner

"Powerful." --Alta Journal

"That memoir was illuminating in terms of my own life... helpful to understanding what immigration does to your brain." --John Cho, actor, for PEOPLE Magazine

"As a member of the complicated postwar Korean diaspora in the US, I have been waiting for this book all my life. Tastes Like War is, among other things, a series of revelations of intergenerational trauma in its many guises and forms, often inextricable from love and obligation. Food is a complicated but life-affirming thread throughout the memoir, a deep part of Grace and her mother's parallel journeys to live with autonomy, dignity, nourishment, memory, and love." --Sun Yung Shin, author of Unbearable Splendor

"What are the ingredients for madness? Grace M. Cho's sui generis memoir of her mother's schizophrenia plumbs the effects of colonialism, war, and violence on a Korean American family. By learning to cook her mother's favorite childhood dishes, Cho comes to break bread with the numerous voices haunting her 'pained spirit.' Cho's moving and frank exploration examines how the social gets under our skin across vast stretches of space and time, illuminating mental illness as a social problem as much as a biological disease." --David L. Eng, coauthor of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

"Raw, reaching, and propulsive, Grace M. Cho's Tastes Like War creates and explores an epic conversation about heritage and history, intergenerational trauma and the connective potential of food to explore a mother's fractured past. This is both a memoir and a reclamation." --Allie Rowbottom,