bittertea reviewed Hungry Ghost by Victoria Ying
None
1 star
I hated...basically everything about this book except for the art.
Most of the book focuses on her actual eating disorder, but it feels so santized, so stripped of the actual physical health consquences of such an eating disorder, it sends a bit of a terrible message. The main character throws up essentially every meal and isn't even so much lightheaded from the process. Even by the end, when she admits she does this, it's still a distant, far away, "I'm sick." I wasn't expecting gruesome, but without meaning too, it definitely would tell an impressionable teenager that throwing up after every meal is a mostly a consequence-free way to stay thin.
The characters never have to grow or change, none of them. Nothing really...happens in this book. Valerie spends her time intoning that she "must be good" but her defiance of her mother happens off page--she stands up once to …
I hated...basically everything about this book except for the art.
Most of the book focuses on her actual eating disorder, but it feels so santized, so stripped of the actual physical health consquences of such an eating disorder, it sends a bit of a terrible message. The main character throws up essentially every meal and isn't even so much lightheaded from the process. Even by the end, when she admits she does this, it's still a distant, far away, "I'm sick." I wasn't expecting gruesome, but without meaning too, it definitely would tell an impressionable teenager that throwing up after every meal is a mostly a consequence-free way to stay thin.
The characters never have to grow or change, none of them. Nothing really...happens in this book. Valerie spends her time intoning that she "must be good" but her defiance of her mother happens off page--she stands up once to her, but not in a way that sets any boundaries or changes the relationship at all--and then we're just told, at the end, she went to the college she feared she shouldn't go to. Her eating disorder recovery also happens off page--she just goes to a support group, and she's good. We see none of that progress.
Likewise, she forgives her mother's cruelty, simply decides its her mother's way of "loving her" so that we don't actually get to see our main character actually process her mother's treatment of her, or deal with it in any way. When Valerie yells at her best friend, Jordan, that she can't imagine why the boy she has a crush on chose Jordan because she's fat, Valerie is never actually required to unpack that. Her friend even asks, "Is that all you think of me?" (or something to that effect) and Valerie never things about why she said those words to her friend.
There was a lot of potential to this book, but it's actual execution left me hating every moment of it.
