This was fun!

Really interesting coming-of-age story about a college student who is grappling with her father leaving, her mother's new boyfriend, and a lurking craving for eyeballs......

I read this in 2 sittings - it was really hard to put down! Ultimately I enjoyed the story and the twists and turns, but something didn't quite connect for me. I still really recommend it - it's unique, gross, and worth your time.

weird, entertaining, stomach-turning, got me cheering for someone's cannibalistic desires lmao thank you so much to netgalley and the publisher!

Ji-won is a first generation college student of Korean immigrants and having been rejected by her first choice school and alienated by friends, she is left picking up the pieces after her parents sudden divorce. When her mother meets someone new - George - she is left scrambling to get her act together to protect herself and her sister. When she attempts to appease and entertain her mother by consuming the eyes of a fish, ‘the best part,’ she developes a sudden ravenous hunger for the unspeakable - human eyes.

Throughout this book all I could think was GOOD FOR HER and I truly would not have had this written any other way. Through the lense of horror and cannibalism Monika Kim examines the fetishization of Asian women in American culture and she does an exquisite job of displaying the ‘nice guy’ trope for us to examine & explore. This being Kim’s first work of horror is astounding and I absolutely have to get my hands on more.

“In Korean, the word for ‘fortune’ is paljua.”

The Eyes Are The Best Part by Monika Kim follows Ji-Won as she navigates relationships, family, and………her appetite.

I enjoyed reading this book. It is DEFINITELY within the body horror genre so be prepared diving in. You may want to check trigger warnings beforehand. I enjoyed the descriptiveness of certain scenes in the story (LOL) and this is the first book to actually make me have a physical reaction.

In addition to the shock value of the story, I really liked how the topics around fetishism, self-proclaimed allyship, family dynamics, and “I’m a good guy” are explored and the effects these things can have on women, especially women of color.

My favorite thing about this book is that Ji-Won isn’t as “innocent” as one may think. Her character is VERY complex in how I understood 100% where she was coming from and have very well felt the same in some situations BUT she also did some messed up things herself……BUUUUUT I still understood what her actions were rooted in LOL. I was going through a constant back-and-forth with her character.

If you want a fast-paced, horror/body horror story with a complex character and interesting societal topics, then this book is for you! If you’ve ever had a white man say “I’ve never been with a [insert minority identity] before” OR “I heard [insert minority identity] enjoy XYZ” OR “I’m not like those other guys you’ve dated”, then you will find camaraderie within Ji-Won’s story.

Thank you to Kensington Books and NetGalley for the ARC!!

Thank you NetGalley and Kensington Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

I was THRILLED when I saw that I was given an ARC of The Eyes Are the Best Part. This is my first book like this and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love an unhinged female character & watching Ji-Won's 'descent' was terrifying, yet fascinating. The ending was very fast compared to the rest of the book, but I still liked it.

I will 1000% be picking up any of Monika Kim's future works!

👁️ 🔪 🩸 Review🐟🥢💍

Title: The Eyes Are The Best Part
Author: Monika Kim

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫/5

Thoughts: I had zero expectations going in and I really loved every bit of this. There were moments that turned my stomach which I can't help but love 😅.
We get to follow a young adult become a women full of carefully crafted rage and wrath. As Ji-won is navigating betrayal from her father, she's also trying to keep her mother's life together while assuring her younger sister.
We see this young woman get a taste for 👁️ and 🩸 as she comes into her own.
I loved the little spin at end that really brought everything together. My only gripe is I think this one could have been a little shorter but that's knit picking. All and all, this was a delicious read 😈.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC of this book.

This is a story about a young woman who has lost control of her life and eventually loses control over herself.
Jiwon is a college student who's father has had an affair and left them, sending the household, made up of herself, her mother, and younger sister, into turmoil.
When her mother introduces them to her new boyfriend Jiwon is disgusted by him and his fetish for Asian women, but can't stop thinking about his blue eyes. She starts dreaming of rooms filled with blue eyes and begins to develop an insatiable hunger for them, kicking off her descent into serial murder.
Eventually Jiwon, and the reader, start to struggle to differentiate between what's real and what isn't as she descends into madness and struggles to hold her family together.
There's some good commentary on asian fetishism and performative femanism within these pages, and I found the lighter moments between Jiwon and the one friend she's made at college to be really nice.
I really enjoyed the slower more descriptive style of the first two thirds or so and felt that the conclusion read a little fast and a little convenient, but as a whole I really enjoyed this book and it's an excellent debut.

I loved the atmosphere and the set up. I like Ji-Won’s character development/spiral and at times I really felt her and her mum and her sister in me. I loved the psychological horror aspect of the story - by which I mean Ji-Won’s misery and torment leading up to the eyeballs, and her predeliction for tomatoes and eggs and her other spherical crutches. (It was less eerie than I expected and more trauma.)

Annoyingly I didn’t love it, which was a huge shame, because I really wanted to love it. I think the length plays a part: either too little time devoted to the development of the plot towards the end or too much time at the beginning setting it all up. It feels unevenly measured. Some resolution points feel a little bit cheap. The hospital scene towards the end feels very expensive, for there to be no commentary from a not-wealthy American family. I’m not American, but I’m East Asian, and I find it difficult to believe the characters (those specific characters with those specific financial circumstances) wouldn’t have a single reaction to being in a hospital, the potential bill or have any notion of blame. I’m not asking for a caricature, but subtle hints and unspoken flinching could really slow the rush of the plot at this point of the story. Hands lose their heft when evenly distributed.

Whilst I found her relationship with her mother quite believable, her relationship with her sister, Ji-Hyun, starts off with an incredible dynamic, but loses its roundedness along the way. If the angry, dismissive exchanges with Ji-Hyun is charged with tension, the actual conversation with her feels a little bit stilted. Maybe that’s the point, but I wanted there to be more than a devoted sister taking her elder sister’s shit.

This is a bit persnickety but I found this jarring - I’m not particularly convinced by cherry tomatoes as a stand in for eyes. I get that it’s an emotional crutch, as Ji-Won starts to crave eyes, but whilst I think it’s a great visual symbol, it doesn’t read particularly gorily.

The other thing that throws me out of the narrative is the plausibility. Isn’t LA one of the most surveilled cities? I find it difficult to believe how the plot plays out without more characters seeing through the resolution. I think more time should have been spent on this? I don’t know.

Overall, I liked the book but I felt that it wasn’t as developed as it could have been and therefore did not love it the way I thought I would. Lots of mixed feelings, and ultimately I enjoyed it, but think it could have gone a lot further.

The premise of this book sounded incredibly interesting and I dove into this book with lots of anticipation. Unfortunately, I thought the 'action' started way too far into the book and ended way too soon for my liking. Of course, you need to establish your character(s) and give them some background, but the first half of the story dragged on a bit because of that imo. Will still recommend this book for people who want to read a good horror, but it wasn't my favourite unfortunately.

Add another incredible character to the Unhinged Women Literary Universe!

Ji-won is a first-year college student living at home with her parents and younger sister. When her father suddenly leaves the family, they are all set on a path none of them expected. Ji-won's mother meets George, a disgusting white man with an insidious Asian fetish and Ji-won does everything she can to hold what remains of her family together. Unfortunately the hardest person to keep in check is herself.
Add another incredible character to the Unhinged Women Literary Universe!

Ji-won is a first-year college student living at home with her parents and younger sister. When her father suddenly leaves the family, they are all set on a path none of them expected. Ji-won's mother meets George, a disgusting white man with an insidious Asian fetish and Ji-won does everything she can to hold what remains of her family together. Unfortunately the hardest person to keep in check is herself.

I loved every second of this book. The path to destruction Ji-won walks feels at once sudden and gradual. Her obsession with blue eyeballs rockets her into actions she would never have thought possible, but somehow I was rooting for her the entire way.

I support women's wrongs, especially Ji-won's wrongs!

Thanks to NetGalley and Kengsington Books for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
I loved every second of this book. The path to destruction Ji-won walks feels at once sudden and gradual. Her obsession with blue eyeballs rockets her into actions she would never have thought possible, but somehow I was rooting for her the entire way.

I support women's wrongs, especially Ji-won's wrongs!

Thanks to Netgalley and Kensington books for the arc of The eyes are the best part!

Could this potentially be my favourite book of 2024 so far? I was expecting a slightly gory, entertaining story about a young girl becoming more and more unhinged, but this had so much more depth and layers than I was expecting.

This book is about Ji-Won, who's father has abruptly abandoned her, her mother and her sister. As her mom finds a new boyfriend (who seems a little too into Asian women) called George, who starts taking up more and more space in their lives, Ji-Won finds her sanity sliding. She's having visions of knives and rooms filled with eyeballs. She's fantasising about eating them. It's gross, it's unhinged, it's riveting.

I'm obsessed with everything about this story, from the way the characters are portrayed to the themes it deals with. Ji-Won, as a young korean American woman, struggles with micro-agressions and stereotypes and sexism and fetishization and plain old racism, and all of those things form such a clear path into her undoing that it's hard to remind yourself you maybe shouldn't really be rooting for her all the way through. Ji-Won's descent into madness is so well done, and the final sentence of the book gave me literal chills. The conclusion was satisfying in a 'holy shit' kinda way. I just love love loved it.

This book was unlike anything I have read before. I thought it was going to be a body horror story, heavy on the gross or moments, and it definitely was, but it was also so much more.

The complexity and depth of this book surprised me and even now days after finishing it, I can't stop thinking about it.

The Eyes Are the Best Part is a great book. I am definitely a fan of the author now. The main character is unhinged and it makes you root for them even more. They get sick and tired of the b.s. in the world and just let loose. They do what everyone only dreams about. It's an intriguing story with characters that have different traits. I look forward to reading future books by the author.

I have a tendency to enjoy stories with unhinged female characters...and this one delivered.
There's an interesting mixture of commentary on gender and race interwoven into this that I really enjoyed. The building and simmering rage that the character has feels genuine. The main character was a complex character - I appreciated the layers given to her.
Note quite as much happened as I perhaps hoped, but it was an intriguing read. I found myself wondering how the story would be wrapped up as I got closer to the end and the pages left were growing smaller. The author pulled off a solid conclusion though. Overall? I enjoyed this one.

I absolutely LOVED this book! The book follows Ji-won as her life falls into disarray. Her father leaves the family to go and be with his mistress. Ji-won, her mother, and her sister are left to fend for themselves. Being the oldest, Ji-won feels responsible for the future of her family. The pressure begins to get to her, messing with her grades during her freshman year of college.

Her mother meets a man named George and begins dating him. George is awful except for one thing…he has beautiful blue eyes. Ever since Ji-won ate a fish eye at dinner one night, she’s become obsessed with eyeballs. Including human ones 👀

I really enjoyed this book! It’s a fun take on the becoming of female serial killer. We see shy Ji-won evolve into a killer.

I loved seeing the family relationship and how much they truly cared for each other. Yes this is a novel about a female serial killer obsessed with eyeballs, but it’s also so much more than that.

I gave this one ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. Once I started I did not want to put it down!

Monika Kim did an incredible job at giving us an unhinged main character whose downward spiral into becoming a serial killer felt like a natural occurrence. Ji-won is the perfect unreliable narrator and you'll find yourself questioning the reality of the situation or whether it's another of Ji-won's bizarre dreams.

The story focuses on Ji-won's experience as a Korean American college student while dealing with the aftermath of her Appa abandoning their family, generational trauma and racism. Her Umma's misogynistic new boyfriend, George, has a fetish for Asian women and the fake woke creep in her class may or may not be stalking her. As her personal life unravels so to does she and she gains an obsession for eyes. What they taste like, what they'd feel like to eat, the bluer the better.

For a debut, it's amazingly well written. I loved how descriptive the writing was and it was easily to feel completely immersed in the story. By the time I read the last line I knew I wanted more.

I am a lover of weird fiction so I was very intrigued by this and I've gotta say, it lives up! Unhinged main character goes on an absolute rage bender and it was so fun to watch unravel. Not for everyone, but those that know, KNOW!

I am HERE for the female rage, the rage against the patriarchal systems, rage against Caucasian favoritism, and rage against Asian fetishes'. This body horror was such a masterpiece and gave everything that I could possibly need in a book. I'm honestly so shocked this is a debut novel, because this was incredible. I cannot wait to see what she writes next!

This is one of my most anticipated books of the year and I was lucky enough to be granted an e-arc through Netgalley.

This book is... a Lot™! Kim manages to deal with many a heavy subject - racism, cultural fetishism, feminism and misogyny, rape culture, Asian identity... I could go on! It's not dealt with what I would necessarily call 'deftly' but that was okay. I really liked the story for what it was and it offered a lot of gore, a lot of horror, as well as some difficult topics to ponder.

I felt the writing could be a bit awkward at times, and I felt in general the target audience is probably not me (30+ yr old white boy)... maybe a combination of the young protagonist, coming of age vibes, and the dialogue I felt was somewhat stilted. But all this being said, I flew through this (thank you short chapters, we are forever grateful) and would highly recommend!

An unraveling young woman.
Toxic men.
A grotesque obsession: eating eyes.
Vengeance.

I don't even know where to start with this.
I enjoyed it, as much as one can "enjoy" this. I read it over two days-- I needed to know where it was going and questioned if I should be rooting for Ji-won as much as I was (smash the patriarchy!)

This was an interesting character study-- a young woman making sense of her life and the less than perfect men in her life-- abandoned by her father, her mother's new, white, Asian-fetishizing boyfriend, and a racist classmate with romantic interests. As her grades slip and her family, and these men weigh on her mind, Ji-won begins to slide into madness, a morbid curiosity taking hold: removing and eating men's blue eyes.

It wild, it's well-paced.
It speaks to the Korean-American experience, family, relationships and is full of 🫣🤢😬 moments. The violence may be a bit much for the non-horror lovers, so if chomping on eyes in graphic details is too much for you (or the cover didn't already deter you), steer clear?

(I'd love to see this as a film, too!
The novel moves like an Asian horror film, slow build tension to an explosion of violence in the end.)