Book Review: Gods & Comics by Kat Cho

Official Synopsis: Seventeen-year-old junior class vice president Grace Bak has her entire future all mapped out with plans to become a doctor like her parents. But the weight of Grace’s own daunting expectations lead to debilitating panic attacks that have made her a virtual outcast at school even to her longtime friend and crush. To make matters worse, her grandmother and only real support system has just died. Halmoni was the glue that kept Grace’s little family together, especially after she and her dad lost her mother to cancer when Grace was too little to have many memories of her. To cope with the grief of another loss, Grace starts a webcomic inspired by the Korean myths her halmeoni used to tell her as a child.

In the webcomic, Sun God, Grace spins the tale of Korean god Haemosu and his love Yuhwa, but with a twist —the two gods are trapped in the bodies of teenagers and worst of all cursed to attend high school. Grace never expected her comic to go viral, but it has, and more astonishingly, the fandom has also somehow conjured the real Haemosu and now it’s up to Grace to get him back home. Except when she starts to fall for Hae, sending him home is the last thing she wants to do. More troubling, Hae isn’t the only god to suddenly reappear. Hae’s sworn enemy has also been brought to the mortal realm and is set on destroying Hae all while infecting humanity with a deadly disease. As an epic battle between gods loom, Hae is without his powers, so it may fall to Grace to fight back against a vengeful god hellbent on punishing anyone who gets in his way.

Though I have seen Kat Cho's books on shelves for a while, I believe this is the only one I've read and honestly I thought it was a vibe. Gods & Comics follows seventeen year old Grace Bak, who is working hard to get into an early program med school program at Boston University while also writing a popular webcomic about Korean Gods. As she tries to juggle everything from school to volunteer work to keeping her dad on track in his life, she is greeted with a boy who looks exactly like the main character of her comic, Haemosu, the God of the sun. In her version of the story, the Gods are presented as teenagers, fighting for their world and their love. So when a teenage Hae shows up at her school, claiming he is being drawn to her...it freaks her out. But the longer she spends trying to avoid Hae, the more she realizes one thing...her comic seems to be bringing the Gods to life.

Now on top of everything else, she has to help Hae find a way back home. The issue is Hae is not the only God to show up in her hometown, but his love interest Yuhwa and her father, their antagonist Habaek has shown up as well. Now kids in her Florida town are ending up sick after interacting with creatures they can barely remember and weird things keep happening to Grace. As Grace and Hae try to fight back against Habaek, while also working with the limits of Hae's powers in a mortal body, they also have to try not to get caught by people who would never believe their story.

When they realize that the one way they might be able to win is to have Grace change the story for her online comic, they finally might have a way to get everything back to normal...even if it means Grace losing Hae in the process.

I think this book had a lot of unique qualities to it. The way it incorporated Korean folklore and legends with the idea that 'now people believe again' bringing them back to the mortal world was really cool to me. This story also brings up a lot about loss and how people react to loss differently. At the beginning of the story we still see Grace moving through the loss of her halmeoni a few months prior. There is also mentions of Grace losing her mom years before the story as well. We see how these loss's have effected Grace but also her father, who seemingly throws himself into his work. I do think at times the story almost felt like it had too much going on but I overall really enjoyed the story.

I rated this book 3.5 / 5 stars!

Gods & Comics comes out April 21, 2026!

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