I Ate the Whole World to Find You
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An entire sea of water can’t sink a ship … unless it gets inside
I Ate the Whole World to Find You maps the topography of trauma, treasures, and loss imposed onto the body of Jenny, a twenty-something-going-on-thirty-something partial hot mess who’s routing her way more firmly into adulthood. As she navigates friendship, family, and romantic relationships, will her inability to communicate destroy her, or ultimately be her rebirth?
A coworker-turned-prospective-lover confesses a hard-to-swallow fetish. A train ride fantastically goes off the rails as old habits get dragged across the tracks. Cousins revisit summer holiday bliss — or was it really horror? Exes fumble an attempt to reconnect over a dip in the pool on a squelching summer day. And an expectant mother slips into an unusual place as she embarks on a communion with her baby more pure than language can accommodate.
Set against an exquisitely lush Australian backdrop, Rachel Ang’s pencils are fluid yet scratchy, precise and evocative, bringing to life the inner and external world of Jenny with stunning realism and gushing imagination. Sprinkled with speculative fiction and fantasy, Ang’s radiant debut collection introduces a dynamic voice to comics, and establishes Ang as one of the most exciting short-story writers working in comics today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Each of the linked stories in Ang's moody debut depicts a young Asian American woman's attempt to find safety and love. Jenny works a variety of jobs; in the first, at a food warehouse, a boss drawn as Mr. Monopoly barks at her and her male coworker to be more productive. But in between hauling boxes, a flirtation builds. Their budding romance is disrupted, however, by his feeder fetish, the obsessive desire to feed a sexual partner as they gain weight. Other stories explore relationships and vulnerability from different angles: a bus crash that prompts heartfelt confessions, a cousin's mysterious physical ailment, the sobering aftermath of a fight and near-drowning at a pool. In the final chapter, Jenny is pregnant and talks to her unborn baby, whom she hopes, perhaps naively, will be a catalyst for her own rebirth. Despite shared themes, the connections between stories can be murky; it's sometimes difficult to discern just how much each one is intended to stand alone. The similarity between some of the sketchy lined character designs adds to that opaqueness. Nevertheless, Ang conveys Jenny's brooding nature, bodily discomfort, and veiled desires through believably messy slices of life. This poignant work will appeal to fans of Megan Kelso's comics and Nicole Holofcener's films.
