I loved this book. I'm not usually a literary fiction fan at all, but I was so taken with the cover and the synopsis that I desperately had to read this one. I thought it was slow-paced, but not at all in a bad way. I thought the relationship between vampirism and colonialism was fascinating, and I wish we got a little bit more of that comparison throughout the book, as well as more of Lyd's thoughts regarding her half-Japanese, half-Malaysian identity. The relationship between Lyd and her mom, regarding her passed on self-hated and eating disorder, and how she dealt with it and managed to try to overcome, was my favorite part of the book. I wasn't sure where the story was going to go in regards to her diet, but I feel like it went the only way it could. I really loved the voice!

"Woman, Eating" contains a modern and unique take on the female vampire. It is beautifully written and I truly enjoyed getting to be a part of Lydia's world. However, I so desperately craved more from the plot. There were several elements introduced throughout the novel that I felt could have been expanded on in order to add more to the story. Still, this is certainly a worthwhile read, especially for those interested in a fresh perspective on vampire fiction.

"A delicate, consistently surprising riff on the vampire narrative, and a stealthy, subversive story of one young woman’s declaration of self."

From my Library Journal review.

2.5 stars, rounded up. Claire Kohda really said, "Sad girl novel, but make her a vampire," and as soon as I read the plot of Woman, Eating I was fascinated. As a long-time consumer (ha) of vampiric fiction and someone who is on board with the recent slew of millennial ennui novels, I was so intrigued by this idea, which felt to me utterly original. Unfortunately, this was one of those cases where the execution didn't really live up to the concept, although there was still a lot about this book that I enjoyed and appreciated.

Lydia is a 23-year-old recent art school graduate getting ready to embark on an internship at an exclusive London art gallery. She's also living away from her overbearing mother for the first time, trying to make it on her own in the city. Complicating matters is the fact that she, like her mother, is a vampire -- one who doesn't drink human blood, so sources of food are hard to come by. Woman, Eating follows Lyd through the first months of living solo: experiencing racism and being stereotyped as an East Asian, dealing with a lecherous older man at her internship, trying to handle her ill mother's affairs, maybe falling in love for the first time, and always, always, obsessing over her insatiable hunger.

Woman, Eating is an introspective, melancholy novel comprised mostly of Lyd's internal monologue, which makes it an unrelentingly heavy read. There's not much lightness in a narrative that is focused completely on Lyd's loneliness, isolation, and yearning. I felt as though the most interesting parts of the book -- Lyd's relationship with her mother, her ethnic identity and cultural history -- went largely unexplored in favor of aspects that weren't as compelling: rambling monologues about human food, falling in instalove with a generic boy, a #MeToo subplot that seemed like it was only included to make the conclusion of the novel more effective. And while I respect that this isn't a horror novel and is instead a character study about a young woman/vampire trying to find her place in the world, I wouldn't have minded a bit more blood-sucking goodness in the narrative. It mostly just read as a long, unfocused metaphor.

Still, though, Woman, Eating explores interesting and relevant themes surrounding identity, isolation, sustenance, and yearning in fresh and unique ways. It didn't quite live up to its potential, but left me intrigued about what Kohda may write next.

This book was amazing. I coudn't put it down. It was magical. Higly recommended! The characters, the plots, the writting: wonderful and perfect.

Lydia is a 23 year old part vampire, part human artist. She has just put her mother in a care facility and is on her own for the first time. She struggles with finding blood, having depended on her mother for getting food. She also struggles with her attraction to Ben, a human who lives in her building. Lydia watches food videos and episodes of Buffy to pass the time, but mostly she thinks about her late father and being part human and part demon. I like my vampire stories to be more focused on the vampire-ness of the main character,, and with more action. This short story is character driven, not so much plot driven.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC of this ebook to read and review.

Like many books, this one is just fine. It's an interesting take on vampirism, and an interesting character study, but it still manages to fall a little flat. This is definitely a literary book, and I think it might find the best success with readers who like high literary work as opposed to people who like vampire books. There is the beginnings of what is interesting commentary re:food and culture, but it never really was able to come full circle.

I thought this was so well written! I loved Lydia's voice as a young woman learning to navigate the world while carrying the burden of generational trauma and a marginalized identity. The self loathing was hard to get through, but it really helped establish the relationship she had with her mother. 

The book uses her vampirism to explore the idea of good and evil, deprivation, empathy, trauma, grief and even colonialism.

I really enjoyed this and was rooting the whole time for the character to just accept herself, love herself, and eat!

Woman, Eating has a great concept—young vampire navigates life (and hunger) among a group of humans in a communal studio space. It’s also got an eye catching cover. I was hoping for something like Only Lovers Left Alive—languid, beautiful, and introspective. Unfortunately this book just didn’t work for me.

I cared about Lydia, but she seemed to make increasingly nonsensical decisions for no real reasons. The novel was almost claustrophobic, and I kept waiting for there to be a bigger payoff. In the end, very little happened besides Lydia’s obsession with food. I’ll definitely give another one of Kohda’s books a try, but this one wasn’t for me.

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for an early copy of this book.

Woman, Eating is like HBO's Girls, but with vampires. Fresh out of university, protagonist Lydia is not the average starving artist. Struggling to determine her direction as a performer, painter, and creator, Lydia also grapples with feelings of self-alienation. (Raised by a self-loathing vampire, Lydia has never shared the truth about what she is or met others like her.) These are expressed primarily in her relationship with food, a cornerstone of human culture that she will never be able to enjoy. Though the narration may start out aimlessly, matching Lydia's nebulous sense of self, it quickens and sharpens as she begins to take ownership of her identity. A clever, introspective, entirely original read.

Book Review: “Woman, Eating” — A Poignant Bite All Its Own
MAY 21, 2022

By Clea Simon

Author Claire Kohda is particularly deft at illustrating how unacknowledged desire will out, undermining our best intentions.

Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel by Claire Kohda. HarperVia, 240 pp., $26.99


You know a Lydia. We all do – or were one, at one point. A young person, striving to forge a life as an artist, she struggles with what she should do and what she wants. Of course, it may be an appetite, she fears, that could undermine everything she seeks to be.

Food, for example, is a loaded topic for the biracial protagonist/narrator of Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating. Stuck caring for her stern English mother who has developed dementia — and whom she has just moved into nursing care — Lydia longs for a connection with her late Japanese father, fantasizing about what he ate. “Food means so much in Japan,” she notes. “Soybeans thrown out of temples in February to tempt out demons… soba noodles consumed at New Year help time progress,” she repeats, reciting what she has learned.

At times, her relationship with food seems straightforward. “In the moments of my life when I’ve really resented my mum and wished my dad were alive, I’ve gone to the Asian supermarket in Canterbury,” she recalls. “Now I just associate food in general with my dad.” If only she could indulge herself.

But Lydia has other issues beyond her ability to savor soba. Having just relocated to London to begin an internship at a prestigious gallery, the young artist is lonely and insecure, coming across as believably awkward and – especially now, as we emerge from pandemic isolation – relatably introverted. “Whenever there is something planned in my life – either meeting a friend, going on a school or uni trip, going for a walk, or, like today, starting an internship – when it actually comes to the day I have to go through with the plan, it goes from being something I’m excited about to something I dread.”

Thankfully, Kohda’s young heroine isn’t all puppy-like self-consciousness. She has come to a mature understanding, for example, of the centrality of her art to her life. “The urge I feel is to return to painting … to see if I can find the shape of myself in whatever I create, to try to identify what I am somehow.” This quest goes beyond a conventional identity crisis. For all her apparent normalcy, Lydia is not your usual young person new to the city. Yes, she is a fledgling artist, hoping to make her mark. But her aspirations as well as her angst are complicated by one defining fact: Lydia is a vampire.

Along with other complications, this condition makes friendships problematic. Her mother, who turned Lydia into a vampire like herself when Lydia was a dying – but still mortal – infant, has taught her daughter to let such relationships go. “’Just imagine she is dead,’” she was told early on. This lesson is painful, but Lydia acknowledges its essential truth. “People – aging and mortal – are like flowers, seasonal, wilting and finite; while I’m like a tree.”

Harder to accept is her mother’s assessment of their shared nature: “We are unnatural, disgusting, and ugly,” Lydia recalls her mother saying. A variation on the body shaming too often passed down from mother to daughter, this message has been internalized by Lydia – until now. At first, Lydia shies away from her nature – and her appetites. But living alone for the first time and mourning the necessity of disconnecting with her childhood best friend, she longs for connection, and she seems to find one with her new neighbor Ben, if not at the chilly and dysfunctional gallery. If only her vampire nature can coexist with their budding romance.


Author Claire Kohda. Photo: RCW Literary Agency
It’s a challenge, but ultimately, her thirst for blood will prove useful in her new life, providing a context for understanding a sexual predator at the gallery. “My mum once told me she believed the origin of our kind was a disease, born of power and colonialism,” she recalls. “That one man took so much that was not his… he stopped being able to nourish his own body with food.” Recognizing her abuser as a different kind of vampire is the simple part, however. Coming to terms with her other hungers – for intimacy as much as sex – is more difficult. Relationships are built on compromise, after all, and Lydia, as we all do, must learn what she can and cannot sacrifice of her essential nature.

In this enjoyable debut novel, Kohda presents Lydia’s thirst for blood as a tidy metaphor for more common cravings. The protagonist’s discomfort with her condition comes across as quite realistic in what is essentially a coming-of-age novel. The author is particularly deft at illustrating how unacknowledged desire will out, undermining our best intentions. Ultimately, not much happens in Woman, Eating, and Lydia’s transformation into a more adult version of herself is telegraphed early on. Still, the conceit works, in part because of the book’s loving detail of the London art scene and a certain type of gallerist/collector. If this short novel suffers from its overreliance on the standard themes of young adulthood, its neat resolution satisfies, with a poignant bite all its own.

Clea Simon’s most recent novel is Hold Me Down (Polis). She can be reached at www.CleaSimon.com.



https://artsfuse.org/256870/book-review-woman-eating-a-poignant-bite-all-its-own/

A new take on the vampire tropes that I found very interesting. Well written and kept me interested. Recommended.

DNF@34% I ended up passing on this one after reading the first third of the book. There was nothing exactly wrong with it, I was just quite bored. The writing was pretty one-note and the main character lacked sustenance. Nothing was calling me to return to the book and pick it up again. Thank you for the opportunity to read and review.

why read another Sad Bitch Novel when you could have a Sad Vampire Bitch Novel ✨

Lydia’s aimlessness threw me off with the pacing at times, but I liked that the exploration of hunger and desire borne of extreme loneliness and otherness was done in such a literal sense of appetite vs. satiation, life vs. death.

4/5

This book is marketed as a thriller, suspense, and literary novel about a female vampire trying to find a way to balance her longing to live amongst humans full-time with her vampiric nature and need to feed. I have to say: that’s not what I got from it at all, but that’s absolutely not a bad thing. I honestly think had this been what was advertised it would’ve been a let down.

There was really no sense of suspense. There was no thrill. There was no mystery or tension. This is a lonely, pensive, somber study of a female vampire who suddenly finds herself fully thrust into the human world, alone, on a full-time basis after her vampire mother starts to (for lack of a better term) lose her mind in an almost Alzheimers-like way and she puts her in a nursing home. She’s been with her mother, and her mother alone, for a long time, and knows nothing of how to live among humans or how to care for herself as a vampire. Like, for instance, how to interact with them like humans should or how to even go about feeding herself on a regular basis without resorting to taking blood from humans.

The whole tenor and plot lends itself to an almost wretched, weighed-down introspective novel in which we have a female vampire who ostensibly looks like a college-aged artist interning at a prestigious art gallery after she’s graduated art school; but with no more guide posts and no one left to guide her in how to BE (her own mother refuses to acknowledge her existence since she’s been moved to a home), she’s simply left adrift and caught between two worlds. She doesn’t know how to legitimately find means to feed herself. She doesn’t know how to talk to humans, ask for what she needs or wants. She doesn’t know anything about the world at large. She doesn’t know how to object or how to speak up for herself. She doesn’t know what’s socially acceptable and what’s not. She’s been brought up to believe she’s a demon and suspects her mother only turned her to have someone to keep her company, and therefore she feels as if she has no purpose in life. What is her existence for, now? She’s like a child in a lot of ways and definitely not like a child in many others.

The entire time we’re inside Lydia’s mind, where she’s consumed by the hunger she resents, is apathetic towards, doesn’t really understand, doesn’t really know how to properly sate, and is never ending. She knows she won’t die if she doesn’t eat, but she knows it will cause unending pain. The reason this book holds no suspense is because we know this woman, ignorant and uncomprehending of how to get by, will eventually feed. She will eventually eat. We all get desperate at some point. At some point, we’ll all eat what’s eventually put in front of us when presented with no other options. Lydia is no different. She’s just given up by the time she does it. It’s more melancholy than thrilling.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Woman, Eating follows Lydia a literal starving artist who happens to be a vampire! After, checking her mom into a home and moving into an art studio, she is thrust into a world through a nativity lens. Slowly she starts to unravel in the pursuit of her desires.

The epitome of a novel where nothing happens but the writing and atmosphere is everything! I adore Kohda transforming the way we think of vampires. Lydia is more grounded in reality and not so privileged as her fantastical, rich, and beautiful vampires' counterparts, whom we know so well from pop culture. I do love the drama, intense, gothic, action-pack vampire romances like the next person but, I highly appreciated a more mundane macabre approach. The novel focuses more on being in solitude when you feel to be an outsider compared to everyone around you. Lydia can be relatable to many. To be young and starving for life, for your dreams, and normalcy, and knowing you still have a long life ahead can be a dreadful feeling especially not knowing the outcome and who you might transform into. Another theme, I love was codependency in a familial aspect. It can be so complicated to set boundaries or even sever ties with a family member to do what's best for oneself when they are all you have known. While I was reading, I became obsessed with the painting "Three Girls" (1935) by Amrita Sher-Gil which was mentioned in the novel. I’m also intrigued to watch Buffy, The Vampire Slayer which I had no interest in beforehand. I'm always a fan of real-life works mentioned in fictitious worlds because I can now consume extra media outside of the reading that I would've possibly never stumble upon. A five-star read for me!

The majority of this novel felt like a character study where the reader just rides along the thoughts of the main character as she listlessly drifts through her life. It felt like we were treading water for about 90% of the novel until she finally "awakens" her true self and then it ends.

TITLE: Woman Eating
AUTHOR: Claire Khoda
PUB DATE: 04.12.2022 Now Available

REVIEW:

Read. This. Book.

One of the most unique stories I have read.

Woman Eating is about Lydia. She is 23, half Japanese and half Malaysian, and a Vampire, turned by her mother when she was a baby. Lydia is hungry and has an insatiable appetite. She longs for Japanese food, perhaps in order to be human just like her father, and craves for life, for acceptance, for friendships, and so many more!

In this character driven story, Woman Eating explores themes that many will find timely that address identity, racism, acceptance, and independence in this coming of age story.

Wonderfully written.

Very interesting and unique take on the vampire novel. Woman, Eating introduces us to Lydia, a somewhat lost and definitely lonely young woman. Alone for the first time in her life, Lydia has moved to London after putting her mother into a home. Her whole life Lydia has lived feeling full of shame for her vampirism - her mother would lead her to believe she is evil, a demon even. Now on her own, Lydia must decide where she fits in and what kind of life she would like to make for herself.

This was a very clever book and I loved all of the discussions around belonging and sense of cultural identity. As a vampire, Lydia cannot eat any of the foods her Japanese father would have enjoyed and she often ponders her connection to him/the part of her that is human. Her mother would not allow her to eat or drink from anything living, so Lydia is always hungry (consumerism/wanting more seems to be a theme of this book).

Overall I enjoyed this book and would recommend this to fans of coming of age stories - with a twist. If you like sad girl narrators this is a book for you! I can’t wait to read more from this author in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperVia for an advanced copy of Woman, Eating.

This book has everything that I should love. Coming of age identity crises, artsy strange main character, VAMPIRES???? And yet, I was so so bored. This is a no plot, just vibes kind of book, but our main character lacks a lot of personality to the point where I didn't particularly like or dislike her. Everything just felt so neutral to me and I'm so bummed about it. I will absolutely be looking towards what Claire Kohda does next and am very excited to see the return of the vampire in the cultural zeitgeist, but this book unfortunately was not for me.

DNF at 46%