An innovative concept for revisiting fairy tales. I was not expecting the dark turn that much of this took.

Thank you netgalley and the publishers for sending me this e-arc in exchange for my honest review.
I really enjoyed this different take on the well know fairy tales. The first few chapters were 5-star material but I found myself getting quit bored near the 75% point. Also, at the end I got quite confused and still don't understand what happened. The writing was good but I think the plot should have been more thought out.
3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

This enthralling novel is a feminist manifesto wrapped in a series of fractures fairytales. The expertly deployed magical realism shines a spotlight on the messy after effects of trauma and the nonlinear path to healing. My one quibble is Gretel’s story feels slightly underdeveloped compared to the other four, but wanting more about a specific character is not necessarily a bad thing. Recommended for anyone feeling rage at a society designed to be impossible to live in.

This is copied from my Goodreads and Instagram review:

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for granting me an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review! All opinions are my own.

Where to even start with this gem of a book....

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even though I didn't initially think I would. The premise is basically that all these well-known fairy tale figures are in a talk therapy session to work through the trauma and process their situations. Each woman tells the story in her own words, and the narrative focuses on each of the 5 weeks of the experimental therapy sessions.

The women telling their stories (which were, again, all a retelling of fairy tales we've all come to know and love) was superbly well written. I really enjoyed it! It is hard to have five unique narrative voices from the same author, but Adelmann does this masterfully. Each character had a very interesting and unique perspective on things, a concrete storytelling style, and an overall beautiful arc of development. This was far and away the highlight of the entire story.

There was a bit of a twist in the story that I was really intrigued by, and while the story doesn't really have a 'plot', per say, it was still a really great dive into character, perceptions, and fairy tales.

I will warn readers that this story, while funny, is VERY dark. There were times that I, an avid horror movie viewer and thriller reader, was a bit uncomfortable with the descriptions. I still really enjoyed the story, it was a bit of a shock to me, so go into it aware.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and it got me thinking a LOT about our society, women, trauma, and healing, while also being a funny and dark retelling of classic tales we all know. Very enjoyable!

Admittedly, the fairytale retelling premise of "How to Be Eaten" is hard to resist. In this story, the lives of 5 women converge as they come together in a trauma small group in modern-day New York City. From tales of imprisonment to kidnapping to a near-deadly encounter with a giant wolf, these ladies have been through the ringer.

Week after week, each woman tells her harrowing truth and processes her trauma, many for the first time. Some of the characters are very direct references to classic fairytales, while others weren't as obvious and kept me guessing--but unfortunately, not in a good way.

Overall, "How to be Eaten" was clunky, strange, and not nearly as imaginative as I'd hoped it would be. There was an emotional element missing in this for me from the very first woman's story, and I found that any semblance of empathy or other emotion I felt while reading this was totally and immediately eclipsed by Adelmann's weird, out-of-left-field graphic descriptions and narrations.

I'm a reader that loves, even craves, weird books from time to time. I can suspend believe, go along with a strange narrative, and I really did love the idea of a classic fairytale retelling here. Ultimately, this story was just too strange and lacked the cohesion and depth I needed to settle into it and truly enjoy it.

2,5 stars rounded up

*Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing my advanced review copy of this title*

I was intrigued by the premise of How to Be Eaten, and intrigued throughout my reading experience. It is a highly readable and engaging story, with each character telling their tale. It's a clever idea to comment on how society "eats" women and their stories, how we consume someone's personal life for entertainment, at least the public perception of their lives. As engaging as it was, something missed the mark. It was darkly funny, gritty, and disturbing, but ultimately failed to inspire any deeper feelings. The "twist" at the end that was building up was... Odd and didn't feel like it added to the story.

This book was an eerie and disturbing collection of dark fairytale retellings. This book was bizarre, and I really enjoyed it. The therapy setting provides a great setting for the collection of stories to be unveiled naturally, though it did feel a little slow at times.

Ruby’s character was infuriatingly stubborn, but her twisted story makes her make sense in the end. The plot twist I genuinely did not see coming, and consequently the ending felt like an odd choice, but the character’s resolutions were all good. I loved how there was camaraderie between the women in the end.

The dark humor is intelligent and witty, and the twisted fairytale stories are certainly disturbing. I am glad I picked up the book just for the eerie retelling aspect of the book.

Thank you, Net Galley for the ARC! <3

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Guys I'll be honest. This was a total cover request on my part...I mean look at it! So cool. Sadly, I should not have judged this book by its cover, as it ended up being a DNF around 20%. My review is obviously just for the book to that point.

"She has practiced her story for weeks now. She has edited pieces of it in her head during almost every free moment— while grocery shopping or riding the subway."

The structure of this novel was pretty interesting. A bunch of fairy tale women are part of a support group in NYC. Since the stories take place in modern day, in the real wold, the stories have obviously been modernized. Each part, or Week, has a few scenes with the total group, told in 3rd person present tense POV, and then drills in on one woman's story in 1st person past tense. I did scan ahead and it looks like this structure hold consistent. I didn't actually mind the POV shifts, though I know some readers are sensitive to that.

I think the author was really going for a fairy tale feel in the writing, but it ended up feeling more like someone was telling me the story than that I was experiencing it myself and, by 20% in, I didn't feel like I'd even mildly connected with any of the characters.

I think the big draw for many readers will be the idea of engaging with well-known fairy tales from a feminist bent. This was certainly what held my interest, after it'd been peaked by the cover. However, I found the themes to be pretty heavy handed and, if I'm going to read a "themes and ideas" novel, I want it to be subtle. This is very much personal preference and might not bother others.

Last but not least, given the modern setting and ideas I found the fantastical elements to be super jarring. I just didn't feel the magical aspects were well integrated and think it might have been more successful to just leave them out.

Oh well, on to the next.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, which takes the feminist nightmares of fairy tales and thrusts them into modern times. A refreshing look at a saturated genre, it made the old feel new.
I can completely see this story being picked up by a streaming service and being made into a miniseries, which I would be very excited to watch.
Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the chance to read this advance copy, all opinions are my own.

I came into How to Be Eaten expecting just another modern fairytale adaptation, and ended up getting a scathing critique of the way we exploit and sensationalize women’s trauma. One issue that I have with a lot of fairytale adaptations is that the way the actual fairytale is used in the narrative is very shallow and surface level; I didn’t feel that way with this one at all. Maria Adelman adapted each fairytale to the modern day in a unique and creative way that simultaneously stayed true to the original stories and gave them more depth than those original stories had.

The highlights of this book are the five chapters in which each woman gets to tell her story. It’s fun to see the ways in which the modern stories stem from the original ones (as well as the ways they differ). The women in this book are very well written and fleshed out. Each of them has a unique voice, as well as a very different response to what happened to them, and the way they interact with each other because of these is super interesting to read. I wish we had gotten to see more of these interactions.

How to Be Eaten is almost entirely realistic fiction, save for a few moments that could be considered magical realism (the talking furniture, the witch in the candy house, the anthropomorphic wolf, etc). Because these fantastical elements were so few and far between, sometimes the introduction of one of them took me out of the narrative, but I still feel they were necessary to each woman’s story and to the book as a whole.

My one issue with this story is the framing device, the support group itself. While each individual story was more than enough to hold my attention, I had very little interest in what went on outside of them. Maybe if more attention had been placed on the women’s lives outside of both their histories and the support group, I would have enjoyed it more. Without giving anything away, I didn’t really like the twist at the end either. It felt necessary to the narrative and the message of the book, but I wasn’t super impressed by it and felt it could have been handled better.

Ultimately, while the framing device is less than perfect, the stories of these five individual women make this book worth reading. This book is entertaining, thought provoking, and difficult to put down. I imagine a lot of other people will find the same enjoyment in it that I did.

I found the premise of this book to be a bit cliché and unoriginal. I feel like I’ve already read this multiple times before so I was pretty disappointed. The writing was okay, nothing that stood out particularly, but did its job. Unfortunately, though I was uninterested the whole time, maybe if you haven’t read anything like this before then you’ll enjoy it but I just found it very underwhelming.

This was... a strange book. A strange, yet interesting read which takes fairytales and reimagines them into women in a support/trauma group.I appreciated the way it handled trauma and the ways in which these women coped. There was dark humor and moments where our protagonist' weren't exactly likable, but I enjoyed all of them. The ending was a bit unsatisfactory in the sense that I really wanted to see how these women fared by the end of their sessions. The twist was strange, but didn't hold water enough to surprise me (not saying it wasn't surprising... I just wasn't interested), but the book in general was fine.

A contemporary, feminist reimagining of classic fairytales, this book is to folklore what “Final Girl Support Group” is to the horror genre.
The writing, which is reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado’s “Her Body And Other Parties”, effectively exposes the violence and misogyny that permeates the bedtime stories we grew up with.

Dear How to be Eaten,
I love fractured fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales. The concept that I read in your synopsis was quite compelling to me, and I was excited to get approved for the eARC. Unfortunately, there were parts of your tale that fell a bit flat for me. I struggled to emotionally connect to the fairy tale heroines who were in group therapy together, trying to heal thier past traumas. They were not well enough drawn for me to emphasize or understand any of the emotions they were going through. The whole intrigue of who Will was wasn't really all that interesting either. I really wanted you to be so much better then you were.

A very interesting twist on classic tales - We talk about the happily ever after but never the reality. This book was an intersection between "real" HEAs and mental health advocacy, loved it!

Thank you NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for this early digital copy in exchange for an honest review. This releases May 31st!

This was such an interesting book. I honestly feel very middle of the road about it. I love the concept and the bulk of the book. We have 4 fairy tale heroines, 3 classic (with modern twists) and 1 modern, who are all in group therapy to help with their PTSD. Which makes perfect sense if you think about what fairy tale heroines have to go through to get their HEA.

I liked the way we learned about each story, getting to hear the women's point of view. And I thought it was very clever that the modern fairy tale was a woman who won a Bachelor style reality show. I liked the exploration of how each character handles their trauma differently and the different levels of awareness they each had about themselves.

I thought in general the whole thing was just so interesting. I liked the idea of seeing what happens after the happily ever after. I didn't love the interludes and felt the end was maybe too simple. But also right on the pulse of what is perceived as important in modern society. Also, while I thought the "Bachelor" style fairy tale was clever it also felt a little lazy since the author took scenes from actual old seasons of The Bachelor. But it was still a great interpretation of a modern fairy tale. And I did really enjoy the hints of other fairy tales sprinkled through out.

All in all I think that it is a good book. It wasn't super spectacular but it wasn't bad and I really appreciated how clever it is. And I am really glad that it was explored. I think this would make a great book club read because I think that it lends itself beautifully to group discussion.

TW/CW: sexual assault, death, torture, talk of internal organs, talk of people being skinned, sex, violence, very graphic description of the Little Red Riding Hood story.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

How To Be Eaten was an extremely creative book. I loved the narrative change it brought, and it read as a complex and captivating read for adults. I loved revisiting the fairytales in this way. There were times where I felt the book dragged a bit, but overall I liked the pacing.

Interesting concept. Don't think everyone's issues were resolved. What was up with the group leader? ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

"A darkly funny and provocative debut novel that reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma." Yes please! Sign me up for this, stat!

How to Be Eaten
by Maria Adelmann
Pub Date: May 31, 2022
Little, Brown. and Company
Thanks to the author, Little, Brown, and Company, and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.
* fantasy *fiction
In this retelling, the author examines in particular media coverage of sensational stories, social media, tabloids, the way we judge women in the spotlight, etc. That sounds like it could lead us to an interesting place but we never really spend time diving into it, we keep hopping past it.
This book just didn't hit the mark with me. Something is lacking. I wanted something more.
3 stars