Woman, Eating

Kohda removes all the glamour from being a vampire. There’s no power, just constant, low-level hunger. It’s not the supernatural that feels horrific, it’s the ongoing effort of trying to function while fundamentally out of place. Always managing yourself, always slightly out of sync. I read this like an existential slice-of-life novel and absolutely loved it. The whole story was very realistic, from the relationships to the moral choices to the pacing. It was more like reading someone's journal than a fictional story.

Fascinating meditation on predator vs scavenger vs consumer in terms not only of sexual relationships, but family and, most thoroughly, the relationships that occur in the art world. Artist to gallerist to collector to other artists. How everyone is feeding off of everyone else, and the way they ignore the other possibilities of life where that consumption of the work of others is less pronounced. It’s particularly interesting coming from the perspective of a new adult vampire, who is only starting to understand her own power and the choices available to her in how to use it.

"Do you think God would feed a body like yours?"

Woman, Eating is a boring book. It is very slowly paced, taking extra care to detail introspective thoughts and aspects of the setting beat for beat. For being over 200 pages, the story could be summarized in a few short paragraphs. But it was this care paired, with the interesting main character, that greatly enhanced the story.

This is a book about vampires, but it isn't really. It's about a girl wrestling with her identity as an artist, an individual, and as something that cannot be understood by anyone else. In that way, it is a very human story. We see a familiar, and perhaps nostalgic, story of a girl stumbling her way into independence after leaving her only family behind, and quickly realizing that she was not provided all of the information and resources to thrive.

There are a lot of heavy topics touched on in this short novel: race, 'original sin', eating disorders, lost heritage, inadequacy, and the artist to name a few. Kohda manages to explore these thoroughly enough for them to feel sufficiently examined without making the book too preachy. Again, the pacing was slow, but given that this was a deep, introspective examination, it was to the book's benefit. Characters were underwhelming and indistinct, but there were so few characters that were important, it didn't feel like a huge loss. I hated the (sparse) dialogue though.

My one primary criticism was that the romance felt underdeveloped and awkward without satisfying payoff. Otherwise, this was a deeply interesting novel that was way more complex than I thought it would be. To be frank, I don't know that I'd recommend this too liberally. I don't see this being an enjoyable read for most people. But it really worked for me. I'm curious to see what works Kohda comes out with in the future.