Claire Kohda’s mischievous debut novel pumps fresh blood into the vampire genre by taking us into the pitfalls of Lydia’s less than ordinary life ... Woman, Eating reconfigures the uncanny — its real chills derive not from Lydia’s bloodthirsty cravings but from the creepy male humans she encounters ... So much has been written on female appetites that the book could easily have felt derivative, but Kohda flips the narrative (woman wants to eat but can’t). I would, however, have liked more family backstory, and the ending feels a bit too easy ... Nonetheless, the book playfully revitalises a tired tradition, riffing on its clichés while delivering a gripping contemporary fable about embracing difference and satisfying hunger.
There is an obvious eating disorder analogy at work in Woman, Eating...yet Claire Kodha’s debut is fascinated not just by the psychology but by the systemic construction of want and shame ... Through sensual, frank prose, Kodha locates gendered and generational memories in blood and skin and digestion, rendering the alienation of otherness a distinctly embodied experience ... Woman, Eating is a long-overdue recalibration of the genre: a brilliant, subversive inquiry into the very politics of desire and denial, and a twisted testament to the depths of female appetite.
[Bram] Stoker...brought the monster squarely into the everyday present: in his case, a modern place of independent women and new gadgetry ... What Stoker did for the vampire at the end of the nineteenth century, Claire Kohda does for it in our own era ... For much of the novel, Kohda stresses the human part of Lydia’s story ... Only hints of the supernatural are given at first ... Horror fans may find themselves thirsting for more of this vampiric side and less of Lydia’s mortal half, while a final flurry of frantic retribution doesn’t quite compensate for the rather languid pace and lack of incident. But there is much here to mesmerize and beguile readers, not least in Kohda’s prose, which is patient, strange and altogether persuasive.
Kohda’s debut is memorable for the refreshing perspective of her conflicted heroine: a vampire of mixed ethnicity and recent art graduate ... Kohda is excellent at conveying Lydia’s alienation and sense of powerlessnes ... While Lydia is well drawn, several of Kohda’s characters feel sketchy. The fellow artists who rent studios are names rather than personalities. Certain plot strands are left hanging ... However, there is much to admire in this original take on millennial angst. Kohda’s depiction of a young woman’s appetites...and Lydia’s loneliness are perceptive. Kohda makes some sharp observations about the world of modern art, its elitism and the precarious nature of jobs in the creative sector.
Woman, Eating interrogates some of the conventional paradigms of the ‘vampire’ trope by re-envisioning them from the vantage point of a mixed-heritage female vampire ... Through Lydia’s first-person narrative, we enter into her eternal and morbid interior world ... Instead of the supernatural happenings present in typical vampire tales, the atmospheric tension is built in this narrative by Lydia’s uncanny feelings of constant supervision from strangers, experiences which often result in racial and sexual violence ... For me, the most riveting part of the narrative is Lydia’s reinterpretation of famous artworks and artifacts of taxidermists, painters, sculpture artists and different myths and legends from all over the world in her search for self-representation ... Although Woman, Eating has some structural problems, such as repetitiveness and uneven pacing, the novel remains a powerful intersectional feminist re-envisioning of the fantastical space of vampires as one that has the subversive potential to bring forth radical change. It was certainly an interesting journey to follow Lydia’s coming-of-age story, with all its nuances and complexities. In Kohda’s enthralling debut, the unpredictable ending serves as a felicitous denouement to this strange and transgressive narrative of liminal identities.
Presenting a genuinely fresh take on the vampire mythos is an exceedingly difficult task in a post-Twilight world of bloodsucker rehash, not to mention enduring classic representation, but that’s precisely what Kohda manages in her debut novel ... Lydia lives at the nexus of several different worlds. But while such a synopsis might suggest a work primed for melodrama, Kohda instead executes her narrative with practiced restraint reflective of her protagonist’s own reticence in navigating a new existence. Indeed, Lydia’s circumstance is never handled sensationally but rather mined for its mundanity ... Kohda likewise smartly resists pat analogy, allowing vampirism to become more a texture to Lydia’s growing pains than a guiding metaphor ... This loose, even defiant approach to narrative expectations can leave the novel feeling a bit slight, but that’s a minor quibble. More books, vampire-themed or otherwise, could stand to feel this intimate ... A delicate, consistently surprising riff on the vampire narrative, and a stealthy, subversive story of one young woman’s declaration of self.
Delicious ... Kohda gets off to a slow start ... But things pick up ... Kodha palpably conveys Lydia’s disconnection from the human experiences she so desperately wants ... The pace quickens, bounding toward a thrilling end, as Lydia questions whether to run from or honor her legacy. Once this gets going, it’s great fun.
Debut author Kohda makes clever use of her premise to explore weighty topics—including cultural alienation, disordered eating, emotional abuse, sexual assault, the stressors of navigating adulthood, and caring for an aging parent—with sensitivity. Though aimless to start, Lydia’s achingly vulnerable first-person narration gains momentum as she achieves self-acceptance—and, ultimately, self-empowerment ... Subversive and gratifying.
