Stevie has a found family—it may be fake, but that’s only because it started as a TV sitcom. In real life, it’s worse.
In the LA of Pool House, Mary H.K. Choi’s adult debut, Wabi-Sabi was a much-loved show starring Mac as Moon’s husband and Adam Dano as her stepson. “The humor orbited,” Choi writes, “around a single bit. Mac was old, his wife was young, and his son from a previous marriage, Todd-Michael Sato-Connor played by Adam Dano, wanted to bang his hot Asian stepmom.”
Stevie, Moon’s daughter in real life, overflows with resentment towards her mother after years fraught with neglect. Yet at the same time, she “knows that she yearns for her mother to a clinical degree.” Moon, similarly, orbits and oscillates between resentment and yearning—one moment she thinks how “she’s given Stevie everything and now her daughter values nothing,” and the next she’s wishing she could open her stomach and put Stevie back inside her.
The two of them live in the clear glass pool house adjacent to the Big House they rent out to tenants to be able to afford their mortgage, so they’re simultaneously too close and too far apart. But when Mac, Stevie’s TV dad, dies by suicide, and Adam, “the great love of [Stevie’s] life … and also her brother,” comes to stay with them in the Big House, the fake family must perform care for one another.
Choi is a genius at character construction, and every member of this cast feels like a puzzle box of foibles. They reveal themselves to us in their performances for each other, which compound until they reach a kind of hyper-vigilance. They study the smallest details of behavior, their “costumes” and “blocking.” They wear tiny behavioral details like accessories in order to signal to one another.
For instance, what Moon wears to Mac’s funeral is highly calculated: the “runway Galliano from ’92, black, slippery silk, with a high priest’s collar and a train, slashed in places at her thighs, her hips, and her ribs,” plus the “Alexander McQueen armadillos in python that she cannot walk in without help.” This funeral is as much a red carpet as it is a bereavement, for Moon especially: “She has never worn the Galliano publicly. She is as nervous as she would be on the first day of a big job.”
They are all watching and simultaneously being watched, and Choi deftly explores themes of surveillance, “the most profitable entertainment left.” She shows her readers that you can see and study someone, but that doesn’t make you closer to them—it puts up a wall.
Stevie, Adam, and Moon know the power of being seen, so they perform to be noticed, but it’s inauthentic. Stevie craves authenticity more than anything, wanting “closeness without stakes. Without loss. Without compromising or giving any part of herself.” She begins to achieve this form of closeness with Adam, once telling him that he’s a stable force in her life, completely unlike Moon or Mac, but his first thought is that he’s “definitely going to fuck this up.”
They all feel a sense of impending doom within themselves. Moon’s mother, Sunny, knew that Moon would turn out to be just like her, and in the same way, Moon feels that Stevie will turn out to be just like Moon, although she wishes something different for her. These characters could change, but they won’t. They’re trapped in the tragedy of their own lives.
Choi explores the grief of tension between the way things are and the way things should be. There’s the house Stevie and Moon should live in, looming over the pool house. The work Moon should have but isn’t getting. The college Stevie should attend instead of working at a fast-food burrito chain. The responsibilities that Adam should rise to but never does. The life Mac should live, cut short.
We get notes of Oedipus and Electra in Adam’s persistent sexual attraction to mother figures and Stevie’s resentful ownership of Moon’s failures in the wake of Mac’s death. The roles they play in one another’s lives begin to multiply: at times, Stevie sees Adam as a brother and at others a lover. Adam has a “deep and pure” love for Stevie as a sibling but can’t help arousal when catching Stevie undressed or seeing Moon in a certain light. Moon wears “Mom Drag” for Adam and reflects that she has “made a wife of [her] daughter.” Their familial love is tangled, corrupted.
Moon is perhaps the only one who can see the way out for any of them: she left her own mother to make a life for herself and, in seeing Stevie as her echo, believes she must do the same. The “thought that Stevie was capable of leaving filled her with thrilling exaltation … Stevie leaving meant that her daughter was restored.” The trouble is that Moon is the main component of why Stevie feels trapped.
This idea of an exit, the end of the show, the finished surveillance hangs over them. As much as they are obsessed with their own performances, the reader begins to question to what degree the characters are in control of which part they play. Bizarre and beautiful, Pool House seeks to ask and answer: what kind of role in life may we step into, and is there a way to escape the track we start on?
FICTION
Pool House
By Mary H.K. Choi
Flatiron Books
Published June 9, 2026
