Review: A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers

A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Certain Hunger is a book that brought me back to Bookstagram, because all of you need to experience this novel. This novel is the type of book that I had in mind when I opened this account, those that are difficult to digest and that stay inside you.

TW: violence, murder, cannibalism. 

The first thing that attracted me to A Certain Hunger was the cover. Yeah, I know: don’t judge a book by its cover. However, this novel's cover replicates the story's central action. It attracts you with its beauty, and once it has you, it entraps you into a narrative of cannibalism, violence, and depravity. 

Dorothy is a successful food critic incarcerated for the murder and consumption of several men, her former lovers. She is serving a life sentence, and while living as comfortably as one can in jail, she dedicates her time to writing because that is what writers do. This time, Dorothy’s main subject is herself, as she writes a memoir to document her life, her reasons, her lovers, and her food. With a particularly poignant and brilliant style, each sentence will awake disgust and awe in you, as it is impossible to digest A Certain Hunger in one go. One must take time to be delighted and disturbed by the twisted mind of a female cannibal. 

My one criticism is about an authorial decision - so you might want to skip this if you don’t like spoilers -, but I disliked how one chapter before the ending we get a ‘reason’ for Dorothy’s appetites. Her reason is that she fell in love once and dislike the ‘nicer’ and boring person she was with this particular man. Losing him was so difficult that she consumes men so they become a part of her forever. And sure, this is fine reasoning for her and it might convince some readers. For me, this addition to why Dorothy kills and eats men was unnecessary, especially when you are about to finish this and have already concluded that she, like many male murderers, has no reason to kill other than she likes it. That is what makes people like her scary because our rational mind needs a reason to comprehend and justify actions. A Certain Hunger distinguishes itself from other female-centered narratives that have a female killer as a vigilante, a revengeful woman with a tragic past. Dorothy comes from a wealthy family. She has all the privileges money, talent, and sexual liberation can bring. Yet the author could not let her be a woman that has an appetite for violence just for violence's sake, and for me, that is such a waste. Especially because of the ending that focuses on female real-life killers and questions why our society thinks that women are incapable of unjustifiable violence.

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