Book Review | Woman, Eating

Lydia is a mixed-race half-vampire who moves away from her mother to pursue an art internship.

However, she's led a sheltered life and living on her own is proving more difficult than she imagined. She's starving. She can't get a hold of the pig blood she typically uses to sustain herself, and she can't quite bring herself to drink from humans.

Meanwhile, she watches mukbang videos and fantasizes about eating human food that her body can't process and yearns to connect with her Japanese father's roots.

Wrapped in a vampire novel, Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda is a brilliant allegory about identity, diaspora, and growing up.

However, I’m utterly torn about this book because I was enraptured by the story ... whenever characters weren't talking.

You see, it’s the dialogue that I took issue with. I think the characters' awkward dialogue was supposed to imitate natural speech, but the sheer amount of filler words (i.e. yeah, um, err) drove me up the wall.

There's a weird disconnect between Lydia's vapid spoken dialogue and the cutting sharpness of her first-person narration. It's so frustrating because they are passages of Lydia's internal monologue that are so raw and poignant, and then it's spoiled by the inanest dialogue. It gave me tonal whiplash, and I wish the dialogue had been substantive enough to match the rest of the story.

Fortunately though, Lydia does spend enough time inner monologuing to help wash the bad taste of the conversation scenes out of my mouth.

Qualms aside, Woman, Eating is overall an intimate, melancholic, and contemplative portrait of a vampire that adds fresh blood to the genre.

Thank you, NetGalley and Harpervia, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Book Details:

Publication Date : April 12, 2022

Publisher : Harpervia

ISBN : 0063140888

Pages : 240

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