Even though she was Chinese, everyone was always asking us if we were cousins or twin sisters. There was one other Asian girl in my class, Eugenia Li. An incident at age six led to a search for identity, and she realized Americans didn’t see her the way she saw herself. But Rachel had more on her mind than just K-Pop star fame and fortune. When discovered at the age of eleven, she moved with her family to Seoul from their home in New York City. Rachel Kim has been training for six years in hopes of becoming the next K-pop sensation. Is the release of two such books in short succession a trailing or a leading indicator: an indication that K-pop will enter the English-speaking pop-culture mainstream, or that it already has? Instead, she uses her platform to address sexism and the competitiveness of the K-pop industry. Shine is not, as one might expect and possibly fear, a self-serving look at Jung’s rise to fame with a fuzzy love story gone wrong.

She’s hardly the first celebrity to delve into the teen corner of the literary world-Hillary Duff and Zoella tread this path some years back-but Jung hails from an entirely different cultural milieu. Jung’s Twitter and Instagram followings of almost 15 million and 10 million each certainly gives her the fan base.

And now she has a debut young adult novel, Shine. Her branding is reaching into film and television. Korean American K-pop star Jessica Jung may have gotten her start as a singer and performer with the hit band Girls’ Generation, but now also has a fashion line and has modeled for make-up lines and magazine covers around the world.

Jessica shine book