The Hunger We Pass Down
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Jordan Peele’s Us meets The School For Good Mothers in this horror-tinged intergenerational saga, as a single mother’s doppelganger forces her to confront the legacy of violence that has shaped every woman in their family.
Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online cloth diaper shop, her resentful teenage daughter Luna, and her screen-obsessed son Luca, Alice can never get everything done in a day. It’s all she can do to just collapse on the couch with a bottle of wine every night.
It’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning and everything has been done. The counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, orders are neatly packed and labeled. But no one confesses they’ve helped, and Alice doesn’t remember staying up late. Someone–or something–has been doing her chores for her.
Alice should be uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who begins to share their haunted family history from Alice’s great-grandmother, a comfort woman during WWII, through to Alice herself. But the family demons, both real and subconscious, are about to become impossible to ignore.
Sharp and incisive, The Hunger We Pass Down traces the ways intergenerational trauma transforms from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break that cycle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lush and eerie exploration of intergenerational trauma from Lee (Superfan) finds Chinese Canadian Alice Chow attempting to juggle running a business out of her home, having primary custody of her two kids, and developing a relationship with a handsome bartender, all while increasingly drinking too much from the stress. So when she starts waking up to find her home cleaned, her products packed for shipping, and food already waiting for her children, it feels like a miracle, though her theory that she herself is doing all this work while drunk or sleeping and then forgetting about it is thin, even in her own mind. She also can't remember conversations that her boyfriend swears they had; her daughter's night terrors worsen; and her ex-nanny sees Alice transform into something monstrous. Whoever—or whatever—has been helping Alice has its own agenda, and it's not satisfied living only half her life. Lee effortlessly shifts between dual timelines, twining the little agonies of modern-day motherhood with flashbacks to the struggles of Alice's ancestors. After the subtle creeping dread built through the bulk of the novel, an abrupt late-narrative shift into more traditional supernatural action feels jarring. Still, Lee's exploration of the love—and misery—of family is nuanced and emotional. It's a haunting excursion.
