WHAT HUNGER, weirdly satisfying and thoroughly revolting at the same time

WHAT HUNGER
CATHERINE DANG
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting coming-of-age tale following the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Ronny Nyugen, 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.

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My Review: Adolescence is a time of Certainty covering terrified confusion, Outrage covering terrified hurt. The cultural Western headiness of slobbering pandering laser-focused attention on the adolescent, a malleable consumer/believer in the making, from all sides ignites the fuel into a solar-intensity conflagration of perspectiveless conviction that, unless *I* like/love/want it, it's a Plot to Ruin My Life.

I get lots of criticism for using Capital Letters in my writing. Here it's done, as it most often is, to highlight an emotional not a rational response evoked or intended by the author (me or other) to be evoked. Perspective needs to be earned and learned the hard way, so this is all perfectly understandable. It's also why so many of us can not stand coming-of-age stories, to the point where I recommend them to those most intensely averse to them in order to watch their manners pumps explode with the effort to say no without screaming at me. (Hiya Kath!)

In this story Ronny's ready-to-ignite rage goes critical in several incidents. The response to that criticality is, in keeping with the title, related to food choices...not unusual for adolescent females, but decidedly NOT the usual eating-disorder narrative I'm heartily sick of reading. It is if anything an inverted use of eating disorders I'm accustomed to. I've known no anthropophagic beings. Plenty of bulimics and anorexics.

What Hunger is a hilariously apt, darkly funny title for a deeply, darkly, eucharistically furious story. It's metaphor gone clear, in scientological jargon, and exteriorized. (Y'all, stick to Wikipedia to look up scientology stuff. DO NOT USE CHAT OR GOOGLE. The consequences are dire.) I'm not always interested in body horror used to explain rage, but this story worked the alchemy I need to get invested in the action. It was indeed gross at times.

Balancing that, and creating what felt to me an exquisite tension, was Ronny's family history of expressing love through gorgeously evoked meals that I damn near passed out from drooling myself into dehydration while reading. What a food vocabulary Author Dang has! It's a pleasure to read someone's upsetting writing when it then soothes me with food.

I'm easy. You might not be.

The most notable dissatisfaction I have is the pacing of the story after Ronny's, um, conversion? discovery? whatever, big change. Action slows to allow for introspection for quite a stretch, and it did not get back to work soon enough for this reader. There are developments that, in their absence of a world-building framework, just sorta...happen...which very seldom works out best for the narrative cohesion or character development. I mean, "ewwwww" is okay if it effloresces out of some Lovecraftian something, not so much done here.

The complexity of the family's internal dynamics are the source of the extra half-star on the three and a half I was planning to award this very good but not outstanding tale. Ronny, like any adolescent, is still molding her responses around her family. She, like the most bearable adolescents I've ever known, is adaptable in her responses still, not hardening into adamant certainty. She has a very touching relationship with her mother and her auntie, both still morphing as she develops.

I don't know if everyone will enjoy the horror bits, or want to experience them getting the good relationship development, but if your stomach is strong this is a contender for your summer reading.

VLADIVOSTOK CIRCUS, lovely tale of self-discovery through running away and joining the circus

VLADIVOSTOK CIRCUS
ÉLISA SHUA DUSAPIN (tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent . . . when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall.

Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.

As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down, leaving the windy port city empty as the performers rush off to catch trains, boats and buses home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas.

What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and immersing the reader into Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: In less time than it takes Houellebecq to clear his throat in The Possibility of an Island, a book which goes on a similar trip, Dusapin starts and finishes this story. Nathalie is a woman who leaves, finds, and abandons in a country that, unluckily for the author, is an international pariah at the time her novel appears in English. Even more unluckily, it features a Ukrainian acrobat performing in a Russian circus troupe. So, through no fault of her own, Dusapin has created an artifact of a bygone time in this story.

Swiss-educated Nathalie has a fashion degree, which she is using in Vladivostok, Siberia, to work with a troupe of acrobats as they pursue a very difficult performance piece. So, already the theme of leaving is prominent: She left tidy, bourgeois Switzerland for the extreme edge of the wildest place in a wild country, Siberia, at the edge of Russia. The country is itself at the edge of the Asian continent; something I think a lot of people forget is that Korea, Dusapin's previously centered culture, is very close to Siberia. Nathalie is now, temporarily, in a port city, working with a troupe of performers who tour with a circus, and who are practicing an extremely difficult maneuver called "the Russian Bar," a name that carries a whole different cultural freight of metaphor in 2024 than it did when she wrote the book in 2020.

This is, one would expect, the McGuffin, the thing that motivates the action but, in itself is fungible. I thought it sounded like a great McGuffin for a young woman abandoning the bourgeois life that a Swiss fashion design degree virtually condemns one to, by literally running away from home to join the bloody circus.

Only partially true.

We do indeed have the young woman (instead of Daniel, the narrator of The Possibility of an Island and my idea of "the Houellebecqian man") on a voyage of self-discovery among the acrobats. Their extremes of hard, dangerous work, their deeply set bonds of trust built from many, many painful falls and much incredibly focused work on balance and dexterity, aren't exactly subtle metaphors for the young woman who abandons an entire life in Switzerland to start afresh to encounter. The work that Nathalie does, the external and honestly almost extraneous work of dressing these finely honed athletic bodies pales beside their training. Her choreography likewise is just a way of getting them out of one position in time to enact another athletic feat, while telling a story.

So she is only a part of the externals, the appearances of the actual group...the men and women whose work and commitment to each other, to building their trust in each other, makes the act...verb and noun...possible in the first place. But this semi-outsider is the one needed to refine and design the public face, the pretty dress that they need to sell the act...verb and noun...to a group of judges.

Okay? You with me on the meaning, and the stakes?

But the McGuffin is decidedly not just the moitvator here. Author Dusapin, deft of phrase, makes this McGuffin into a deeply explored reality:

Backstage, a pungent animal smell hits me. Straw scattered on the ground. Streaks of dirt on the walls. Like a stable but with velvet lining—hoops instead of horses, waist-high wooden balls, metal poles, tangles of cables, drones in the shape of planes, straw hats hanging on hooks. Leon tugs a cord and the curtains part.
–and–
She places a chair on the bar, balances it on two legs. They hold it in place for as long as they can, barely moving a muscle. Sometimes Leon is there with me. He explains to me why exercises of this kind are so important: the flyer has to rely entirely on the bases for balance and not try to stabilise herself at all. Think of Anna as the chair, he says, that’s how passive she has to be. It’s one of the hardest things about the Russian bar discipline.

There's a lot more detail about the specifics of the Russian Bar, and while I applaud Author Dusapin for making the physicality of the act...verb and noun...so starkly plain to us, and drawing our attention to the extreme discipline it takes a woman to perform as expected under the constant pressure of a hypercritical, unseen audience, its details are rather more prominent in the story than my interest in them required. It gave me rather less pleasure, then, than Author Dusapin's previous novels did.

But let's be clear about this: I enjoyed this novel a good deal more than most. I enjoyed the lovely translation. I enjoyed the thought-provoking metaphor of acrobatic performance for a young woman's acquired presentation of self; I enjoyed the Asian setting's evocative potentials. This is a compact, intense dose of good storytelling.

SALEM'S CIPHER, or "What the Patriarch Will Stoop to"

SALEM'S CIPHER
JESS LOUREY
Thomas & Mercer (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A troubled codebreaker faces an epic plot reaching back through centuries of America's secret history


Salem Wiley is a genius cryptanalyst, courted by the world's top security agencies ever since making a breakthrough discovery in her field of quantum computing. She's also an agoraphobe, shackled to a narrow routine by her fear of public places. When her mother's disappearance is linked to a plot to assassinate the country's first viable female presidential candidate, Salem finds herself both target and detective in a modern-day witch hunt.

Drawn into a labyrinth of messages encrypted by Emily Dickinson and centuries-old codes tucked inside the Beale Cipher, Salem begins to uncover the truth: an ancient and ruthless group is hell-bent on ruling the world, and only a select group of women stands in its way.

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My Review: Secret history novels are always fun for me...they put a spin on the facts that usually makes very little sense, but has the lovely quality of being off-the-wall...and this outing into that garden of fantasy is no disappointment.

If James Rollins had written a woman-centered story, this is what it would feel like. Since I like James Rollins, I think of that as a compliment. Salem and Bel, with their matrilineal cultish secret society, The Underground, are in opposition to the male-dominated world-spanning cult, The Order...don't you love the harkening back to the antique world's division of authority into women/Earth::men/land?...each side ready to lie, cheat, and kill to accomplish their goals. The two (so far) stories in Salems world make it clear that the nightmare of christian nationalism and fascistic order/totalitarianism are only going to be effectively opposed by women organizing and taking their power back into their own hands.

This being a message I am totally on board with, I say go get you a copy and learn what one intelligent, observant woman thinks is worth fighting for, and how to do it. I won't say it's a roadmap since we live in mundane reality not Conspiracytopia, but I will say I agree that the stakes are existential.

When the next woman is nominated to run for president I will not be surprised if she faces some sort of threat very similar to this story's plot. There is no reason to think that the incels and MAGAts will change in the next four years. I hope that somewhere there is an actual real-life cabal of powerful women ready to blast the patriarchy that will come gunning for her. If they had the quasi-mystical powers that the Underground...do you not just love the echoes of Persephone in that name?...and if they could just use Emily Dickinsons poetry a a cipher, too....

The idea of power in the hands of women scares some men so badly that they will stoop to anything to stop it from occurring. This being amply demonstrated by the events of 2016, when the first version of this book came out, the anxiety that propeled this story reads as relevant today as it ever has. Absent some Great Dismantling of the patriarchy, the plot of this story will remain evergreen.

An excellent investment of a minimal amount of money, for very solid return of pleasure in the read.