What Hunger
A Novel
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- $299.00
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- $299.00
Descripción editorial
One of Goodreads, Book Riot, and AV Club’s Most Anticipated Horror Novels of the Year
“Incendiary...this one hits hard.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Intense, visceral, and not to be missed.” —Booklist (starred review) • “A tour de force.” —Capes and Tights
A haunting coming-of-age tale following the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Ronny Nguyen, as she grapples with the weight of generational trauma while navigating the violent power of teenage girlhood, for fans of Jennifer’s Body and Little Fires Everywhere.
It's the summer before high school, and Ronny Nguyen finds herself too young for work, too old for cartoons. Her days are spent in a small backyard, dozing off to trashy magazines on a plastic lawn chair. In stark contrast stands her brother Tommy, the pride and joy of their immigrant parents: a popular honor student destined to be the first in the family to attend college. The thought of Tommy leaving for college fills Ronny with dread, as she contemplates the quiet house she will be left alone in with her parents, Me and Ba.
Their parents rarely speak of their past in Vietnam, except through the lens of food. The family's meals are a tapestry of cultural memory: thick spring rolls with slim and salty nem chua, and steaming bowls of pho tái with thin, delicate slices of blood-red beef. In the aftermath of the war, Me and Ba taught Ronny and Tommy that meat was a dangerous luxury, a symbol of survival that should never be taken for granted.
But when tragedy strikes, Ronny's world is upended. Her sense of self and her understanding of her family are shattered. A few nights later, at her first high school party, a boy crosses the line, and Ronny is overtaken by a force larger than herself. This newfound power comes with an insatiable hunger for raw meat, a craving that is both a saving grace and a potential destroyer.
What Hunger is a visceral, emotional journey through the bursts and pitfalls of female rage. Ronny's Vietnamese lineage and her mother's emotional memory play a crucial role in this tender ode to generational trauma and mother-daughter bonding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Dang's incendiary sophomore novel (after Nice Girls), a Midwestern teen grapples with grief and a generational divide with her Vietnamese immigrant parents while discovering an insatiable appetite for raw meat. As the story opens, 14-year-old Veronica "Ronny" Nguyen attends her older brother Tommy's high school graduation, where he's honored as valedictorian. Their parents fete him with a lavish party featuring crisp pork belly and roast duck, but as summer approaches, tension brews between the siblings and their parents ("We were American kids with Vietnamese parents. We were foreigners to them: a spectacle, an experience," Ronny narrates). Tommy chafes under the family's strict rules, and after a bitter argument, he stays out late and is struck by a car and killed. Distraught, Ronny's father finds solace in alcohol; her mother falls into a deep depression and wears the same ratty, brown robe every day; and Ronny feels adrift ("I felt nothing. No nerves, no excitement, no dread"). That fall, she sneaks out to attend a house party with older kids, where she's sexually assaulted and escapes her attacker by biting his ear off, which energizes her. She finds that raw meat quells her melancholy and rage, and takes to eating raw steak from the butcher shop as she fantasizes about killing and eating her assailant. Dang keenly captures her narrator's alienation and anger, and the intergenerational tale concludes with a powerful revelation about the parents' unspoken trauma from the Vietnam War. This one hits hard.
