BookBrowse Reviews Pool House by Mary H.K. Choi

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A famous but broke actress and her 20-year-old daughter struggle to understand one another.

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Moon was once a Hollywood ingénue. Now that she's nearing 50, the roles have dried up, and she lends out her lavish home via a short-term rental site in order to pay the mortgage. She and her 20-year-old daughter, Stevie, live in the cramped, dirty pool house while their own home plays host to an unending series of guests. When a loved one dies, Moon reaches out to her friend Adam, a former co-star in his 30s, for support, and he insists on coming to stay with Moon and Stevie. With a few weeks until their next tenants arrive, prideful Moon moves back into the main house, acting as if she's lived there all along. While Stevie appreciates the newfound space, having a third person join their household throws a further wrench into Moon and Stevie's already fragile dynamic.

Pool House is an emotional gut-punch of a book, painting a dramatic but realistic portrait of a family on the brink. Though Stevie is bright and academically gifted, she's skipped college, both because her family can't afford it and because she feels like she needs to look after flighty, erratic Moon. Moon, meanwhile, both longs to be closer to Stevie and pushes her away. Having come to L.A. alone while still in her teens, she thinks Stevie is coddled and soft for not forging her own path, unable to perceive the ways in which she has held Stevie back. The book is told in close-third-person chapters, alternating between Moon's, Stevie's, and relative outsider Adam's points of view. By getting a peek inside each main character's head, the reader is able to understand them, even though they fail to understand one another. We see how their perceptions of one another differ from what is actually going on in their respective inner worlds. This narrative choice effectively allows readers to really dig into the complexity of these relationships.

Beyond the interpersonal relationships, one of the novel's main themes is the experience of being an Asian woman in Hollywood. In her younger years, Moon, as a beautiful woman of Korean descent, was often typecast into stereotypical roles, playing the exotic seductress. Her longest role, on the sitcom where she met Adam, was as the wife of an older white man whose son was comically in love with her. She was never on the A-list, but throughout her twenties and thirties, she was able to get steady work. In middle age, however, even the stereotypical roles have dried up. Meanwhile, the white man who played her husband on the sitcom continued to get starring roles—and relationships with younger women—long after the show ended.

Readers see Moon wrestling with her self-esteem after being spit out by the industry she once relied on for validation. This is an all-too-real experience many actresses face. Seeing Moon as someone who once cashed in on racist and sexist stereotypes also forces readers to wrestle with her possible complicity in these problematic depictions. She was in many ways used by the industry, but she also profited from its reductionist portrayals. And yet in the eyes of some of the book's younger Asian characters, she's a hero for providing any representation in Hollywood, however problematic. The narrative doesn't provide neat resolution here, instead leaving readers to grapple with the tension.

Though the novel loses a bit of momentum in the middle, as we see similar themes repeated in successive chapters, the ending is jarring in the best way. The author takes things in an unexpected direction and it elevates the story from standard character-driven lit fic to something uniquely compelling.

Pool House makes for a dramatic, sometimes tragic, and at times uncomfortable read. Choi is unafraid to linger on the characters' devastating or embarrassing moments. Each detail she includes feels carefully chosen, always telling us something important about the characters and the ways they perceive the world around them. Though the family's circumstances are unique, the loving but tense familial relationships are realistic and will likely feel relatable to many readers. With so many layers to each character to dissect, Pool House would make a fantastic book club pick.

This review first ran in the July 15, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.