Review of Red String Theory by Lauren Kung Jessen

*Red String Theory* by Lauren Kung Jessen (2024). Published by Forever.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m watching.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

If you’re a more frequent reader of my blog, especially my book reviews, you’ll probably learn that there is one major way I source my books: by wandering my local library. I am blessed to be inside of an incredible library system where I often don’t have to worry about censorship (as of right now), and they’ve been increasingly diversifying the kinds of authors and national literatures that they’ve brought onto the shelves.

I don’t like to buy books too often for the sake of space and money, as I don’t want to become a book hoarder too much, so I check out books as much as possible. I was in the new fiction section when I spotted Red String Theory’s spine among the many books there, and I wanted to read it based on the “red string” part of the title.

I usually don’t go for romance at all. It’s rare that I pick these kinds of books up, but I wanted to diversify my reading lists in early 2025, when I read this book (this review is scheduled to go out much later due to the sheer amount of backlog I have to get through). I read the synopsis, and that’s what made me shrug and decide to check it out to meet this goal.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much, as I know these introductions can get quite long sometimes.

After a fateful night in New York, an artist and scientist finds themselves drawn back together by the red string of fate.

We begin this novel with the main female lead: Rooney Gao. She’s the daughter of a well-known artist, and she’s an artist herself. Lately she’s trying to set up an exhibition an NYC park involving red string, and she’s got another agenda on the deck: she wants to acquire the video her mother took of her birth. It’s been on a rotating museum run, and she finally wants to get the money to own it herself and reclaim it.

It’s in her territory of New York that she bumps into a guy named Jack Liu. He’s the stereotypical successful scientist, and he’s only in town for a couple of days. When he runs across her string installation at the park, he wonders about the artist, and it really sticks with him.

He ends up meeting Rooney that night as well, and he doesn’t know she’s the artist behind the work he literally just saw (she makes it under a different name and doesn’t present her face). The two go around the city throughout the course of the night, eating fried dumplings and exploring all of Rooney’s favorite haunts, but then they lose touch after this magical night together.

Jack goes back to the other side of the country and continues his work at NASA. But when his superiors are floating around the idea that they want to include public art and need to find an artist, he immediately goes back to thinking about his time in New York. The red string installation really stuck with him, and he brings it up in a meeting.

And that’s how Rooney ends up in theor office in front of him, much to his shock, as the artist he had asked for. The rest of the novel is the push and pull between these two and their romance. The chemistry was there from the beginning, but because they lost contact information and couldn’t find each other again, the red string of fate worked in a different kind of way to reconnect them.

Overall Thoughts

I found this to be a pretty simple novel overall when it comes to plot. I tend to think that when I read romance novels like these, they’re very straightforward in the sense that I don’t have to think too hard about the plot.

It’s a cute book though! I enjoyed having the contrast between the artist girl and the scientist guy, which created two unique characters that approach life in completely different ways.

That said, I don’t know if I would return to this novel. I just didn’t love it, and I think I feel this way about books like this in general. It’s why I don’t read romance, but I’m proud of myself for trying to actively go outside my comfort zone and challenge my perspective that “I don’t like romance” might apply to all books in the genre. Maybe one day I’ll find my white whale!

Give this is a chance if you’re interested. Pick it up at your local library or indie bookstore for sure. Just because I didn’t love it means that you wouldn’t either. Taste is so incredibly subjective!

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