Trying to walk a middle road of accessibility and plausible deniability hurt the story here, because neither audience really gets much out of this book. The people picking up this book aren’t going to be random people interested in a kpop story. I think the book missed the mark here, though, since a general audience has much better examples of YA to choose from with better writing and more developed characters. I think this provided a lot of background and setup for readers who might not be die-hard kpop fans and was less written for people who were already Jessica’s fans and more for a general audience. Furthermore, the plot hit some pretty predictable YA-story beats, leaving readers feeling like it was a bit generic. It had some details that people had previously speculated on, like the diets, blacklisting of groups from music shows, and secret dating lives, but didn’t really have anything that surprised seasoned-kpop-fan readers.

Shine promised to be a tell-all, but spent all of its time on the trainee era.

Where Shine Went Wrongīefore getting into how Bright improved on Shine, I want to expand on some of the criticisms of the first book, because I think that context is pretty important. Bright doesn’t ask its audience to read between the lines, it seems to be the story of Jessica being kicked out of Girl’s Generation. With Jessica’s sequel, Bright, I went into the book hesitantly expecting more of the sleuthing required to tie the story to the real-world events that Jessica experienced, but was pleasantly surprised to find the story people had hoped for all along. This initially created a lot of buzz with people wondering if this would be the tell-all of her infamous Girl’s Generation departure, but fans seemed disappointed in the focus on Rachel Kim’s trainee era and the general self-insert fanfiction writing quality. Jessica Jung described her first book Shine as an Easter egg hunt, promising details of the kpop industry and her own experiences hidden among the YA-tropes of her protagonist Rachel Kim’s professional and romantic pursuits.

Jessica jung novel