A composite of those women, and her own life, became the inspiration for Mary — or Yu-Rhee — the protagonist of Choi’s debut novel Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, published by Simon & Schuster Canada. Mary, who lives above her parents’ convenience store, struggles with hormonally charged teenage emotions and experiences, but still must act like an adult, knowing very well that her first priority is always to her family’s business and livelihood — as her traditional mother never lets her forget...For those in the community, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety will resonate in its accuracy and details, but for those who only head into their local convenience stores for milk and newspapers, the book is a revealing look into private lives.

It always amazes me when a debut novelist features predictable themes - maybe bordering on clichés - and still comes out with something extremely effective....There's a lot to like here. For one thing, it's a sharp snapshot of Toronto at the time: the just burgeoning Koreatown, U of T's huge, intimidating buildings, the track where sex workers plied their trade near Trinity Bellwoods, which made the neighbourhood more than a little sketchy....But the characters are believable, especially Mary's mother, who's loving but has a hard time expressing it, and the book has a powerful emotional core. Few Korean-Canadian novelists have been heard from so far, making Choi's book a welcome breath of fresh air.

Ideas of fate and luck are important to the novel – and so much luck is terrible. The novel reads up quickly, mostly propelled by one disaster after another. Violent assaults, robberies, shootings, suicide, domestic violence, attempted rape and an actual fiery explosion is a whole lot of action for a single novel, and the literary impact of these incidents is undermined by their frequency – it all becomes a melodramatic blur.

While such pacing will certainly appeal to younger readers, others will lament a lack of depth....Even with its flaws, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety is the kind of book for which many have been hungering for too long. The novel’s greatest strength is showing that what looks like passiveness from the outside (a girl stuck in an unlocked cage) is actually Mary’s slow-but-sure plotting toward her ultimate liberation – her subversions must be subtle and within a certain framework.

Choi also nicely complicates Mary’s resolution about her difficult relationship with her mother – she learns to empathize with her, finds common ground and comes to appreciate how her mother has actually helped her realize her dreams