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. T...