I found this book to be really unique and I really liked the premise of Lyd being on her own for the first time and being responsible for finding food. I wish there would have been more elaboration on her relationship with her mother and how this dynamic worked between them. I felt like she was coming into her own with fairly limited knowledge of obtaining her own food sources. I found this to be a pretty interesting take on vampire genre and really liked that it was character driven and different. I really would have liked this to turn into a mania situation with all of the food porn that Lyd viewed and after tasting someone initially. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley.

This book was one of my most anticipated reads for the year, but it was a major disappointment.

I love books of female rage and men getting their comeuppance, but this novel did not do it for me. The writing was boring and I just could not get into it.

It also was not what I was hoping the story would be so that didn't help when it came to reading it.

So much fun with this one even though I was truly ache for Lydia for the whole of it.
Very surprised I was able to devour this book considering I typically steer so clear of books where a major part includes Alzheimer's or anything similar due to personal reasons. I felt it very fitting though for her struggle.

I'm getting lucky with excellent character-driven novels this week. Jane Lui, the audiobook narrator, absolutely steals the show. Wow, does she do a good job bringing out the sensuousness of the main character, Lydia, who is a vampire. Lydia yearns to figure out who she is--more demon or human, more her mother, a vampire and Lydia's maker, or her father, a human. Her struggle to find her true self--instead of what her mother and society say she is--is engrossing. This is a tale to get lost in.

A big thanks to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for a copy of this ARC.

9 Books About Our Many Complicated Relationships With Food

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

Of course Claire Kohda’s contemporary vampire novel Woman, Eating is not the first of its kind to feature an immortal creature regarding tender humans as sustenance. But for biracial artist Lydia, trying to exist among humans is a constant reminder that she will always be more than one thing: Japanese and British, but also demonic and human.

When she’s not managing her bloodlust with pig’s blood (despite how good her human flatmates smell), she’s struggling to reconcile these various identities. One of the book’s most affecting moments has Lydia binge-watching “what I eat in a day” and ASMR YouTube videos, pondering how humans need to control food yet also constantly moralize it… just, as it turns out, like her.

As a lover of vampires, I was surprised by this introspective and sad book. I loved the present day setting, and the longing and loneliness that was portrayed. Her literal and metaphysical hunger was especially moving, with lots of reflective and beautiful prose.

Follow a vampire as she tries to find balance between her desire to experience humanness and her urge to act like the monster she truly is.

The language of this novel is incredibly beautiful and is what motivated me to keep reading. I loved how unique the concept was. With this said, I found the plot incredibly slow and wondered what the author wanted me to leave the book feeling/knowing. It felt a bit too fluffy/ trying too hard to be meaningful. I almost wish the author leaned into the character’s flaws more. Would still recommend it though.

This book astounded me. It was engrossing and beautifully written, and I was captivated by it. I know this review is late; I'm finally getting through my backlog to the ones that slipped through the cracks, and I'm so glad I did. This was worth the wait. Thank you for the chance to read it!

“People---aging and mortal---are like flowers, seasonal, wilting and finite; while I'm like a tree.”
Quiet and melancholy, a vampire story planted firmly in the ‘sad girl’ genre, and I loved it. All vibe, little plot (i.e. totally my jam!), Lydia is a lonely young artist, trying to find a place in the world, without her mother for the first time, struggling with her ‘food’ issues, and her immortality. Gorgeous writing, a really great debut.

I just loved this. Really interesting take on vampire mythology and I found Lydia's relationships with the other characters very interesting. I did feel a little let down by the ending as I expected more to happen with either Gideon, Ben, or Lydia's mother, but I really enjoyed the book nonetheless.

For a book about a young vampire in London, Woman, Eating is surprisingly quiet, introspective, and artful in how it presents its themes: finding ourselves at the precipice of adulthood, what love is, reconciling the many different facets of our identity, overcoming shame, and even handling grief.

The plot itself is relatively simple. We follow Lyd, a 23-year-old vampire that just moved to London after admitting her vampire mother to a nursing home because of memory loss. It's Lyd's first time living on her own and she's managed to snag an internship at an exclusive art gallery run by a famous artist that admires the work of Lyd's late Japanese (human!) father. An aspiring artist herself, Lyd rents a windowless art studio and begins living there, mingling with the other artists and falling in love with the young, human, engaged Ben.

This short, but stunning novel really brings us deep into Lyd's world as a vampire -- her loneliness, her self-loathing, her intense desire to live a warm, fulfilling human life, and her reconciliation with her upbringing under a mother deeply ashamed of their inhuman biology. Because Lyd has a hard time sourcing pig's blood -- the food she is used to consuming -- we see her spiral inward into her ever-growing well of hunger where she becomes increasingly more desperate to free herself from what she deems her "demon" half, trying to starve the vampirism out of her human body. It functions as a surprisingly poignant metaphor for coming of age and coming into identity -- figuring out what it means to be you apart from your parents and your past.

Because Lyd also exists as a mixed-race woman in a male-dominated field, her status as a vampire also serves as a lens through which we can reflect on her feelings of otherness and detachment from those around her.

One of my favorite aspects of the book is the vampire mechanics Claire Kohda created. When Lyd eats, she experiences all of the feelings and sensations her meal experienced, essentially drinking not just their blood, but their entire life force. She then internalizes their characteristics -- ie becoming buoyant and daring when drinking from a bird. This made Kohda's vampires feel unique, despite them being a popular literary trope.

I feel like Kohda was very ambitious in everything she tried to cover in the narrative, which made it so that no one theme felt 100% fleshed out. I felt like she could have leaned into them a little more -- especially Lyd's relationship with her parents and what art (and the art world) meant to her. If it went just a liiiiiiiiiiittle deeper, this may have been a 5 star for me.

Overall, this is a fantastic read in the Sad Girl genre and I recommend it to anyone that likes a more introspective, character-driven story. I can't wait to see what Claire Kohda does next!

This book had a fantastic, complicated main character and a great ending. It was a unique and fascinating take on vampirism and I enjoyed the main character's meditation on humanity. 4.5 stars rounded up.

Breathing this book is like being in a old time film noir. It has Dracula vibes and also a mix phantom of the Opera and mean girls? It's such a neat gothic book

"I don't know where the human and demon in me connect, whether there are roots that sprout from the demon and reach for and attach onto the human, or vice versa."

I'm going to keep this review sweet and short, like the book: this is a masterfully written story which require weeks, if not months, to study all its intricate layers after you've put it down. The main character, Lydia, is a young adult woman/vampire, trying to live, create art and survive on her own after she had forced her aging, dementia-suffering vampire mother in an elderly home. It's a story on inter-generational trauma, on the way food connects people of one culture, on the ethics and morality of eating ("There always seems to be something that suffers or dies as a result of any form of food consumption"), on creating and possessing art, on accepting the duality of good and evil within ourselves. If you're looking for a heavy plot, this book is not for you. If you're looking for vampire lore, this book is also not for you. If you're looking however for a character study, pieced together with simple yet superb and engaging language, this is the book for you. Be prepared for an open ending, which is both too quick and so satisfying. This book is an experience for those who are patient. You'll know if you connect with the story within the first few pages. If you do, keep going. Easily one of my favorite books of the year.

This book was a disturbingly melancholy tale about a self-aware, slightly kleptomaniac, vampire woman told in beautiful prose. There are also incredible themes regarding identity and the vulnerability of women. This was a captivating debut novel and I can’t wait to see what comes next from this author.

Quite a bit of existential angst here but not a lot else. Things that I wanted to have more explanation here did not and things that did get a lot of page time weren't as exciting to me. Atmospheric, but I prefer a book that's a bit more plot oriented.

This book is a fever dream of vibes and character- and is also vampirey. Sound like a weird description? It is! But it's also accurate. This is a novel that includes vampirey elements in a totally new way, so don't skip this if you're thinking UGH vampires again?!

Will definitely recommend to readers who like eccentric books that are heavy on vibes but no so much on plot- but I really dug what Kohda did here!

Thanks so much for the review copy!

Lydia is a vampire – has been all her life, since her mother turned her as an infant. Now she’s living on her own for the first time, and having trouble tracking down blood.

Though I did not know there was a term for them, I have long been aware of the Sad, Strange, Miserable Women that populate the modern literary landscape. Generally I have avoided them, if only because I can contrive to be miserable enough without heaping the troubles of fictional people atop it. But this book is different, because Lydia’s alienation is way more literal – she is no longer human.

It’s a pretty excellent metaphor. And the book has a wonderfully claustrophobic quality to it, sinister despite not very many things that are sinister on the surface happening. Lydia’s relationship with food is also an interesting read, both in itself and in how it speaks for her loneliness.

However, I felt that the central plot was simply too thin for the length of the novel. I skated through this book pretty fast, but that’s because a lot of it is just Lydia’s juddering thoughts and self-reflections. I also thought the ending was very predictable – I knew where we were going after Lydia’s first few days of work. This might have worked better as a novella, or even a short story.

I was told this book was more literary than horror, and that's very much true! It's less of a vampire tale than a tale of a woman struggling with her identity and desire, like Acts of Desperation with elevated stakes (ha). I really enjoyed it. I listened to the audiobook and there were points where I zoned out a bit, but the writing was gorgeous and I love the struggles of the main character. I wouldn't say it's necessarily atmospheric, but definitely more of a character study than something you read for plot.

This book honestly did not hook me in the beginning. It felt like too much fantasy for my taste, which is not to say it's too much fantasy for people who enjoy fantasy! But I was into it by about the third chapter. Yes, Lydia is a young vampire finding her way in the world and fighting new urges, but she's also a 20-something woman unsure of her purpose in life, exploring her culture, and dealing with unwell parents. I think this is more suited toward fantasy readers who want to explore literary fiction rather than the other way around, but it's also a fun read for anyone obsessed with "unhinged" women in fiction. And the ending was simple yet really satisfying.