A Certain Hunger: Chelsea G. Summers

Product Information

Book Genre: Adult, Adult Fiction, Contemporary, Feminism, Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Mystery Thriller, Thriller, Womens

a b c d Silverberg, Amy (2020-12-01). "Why Can't Women Be Serial Killers, Too?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-12-02. dorothy honestly believes herself better than criminals so she refuses to hang out with them, instead choosing to get caught rather than forge a false id and passport to leave the country. A Certain Hunger is a gripping monologue-style story that follows the life of Dorothy Daniels, a tenacious and passionate food critic. Despite her success in her career and love life, Dorothy's true mystery lies in her hidden identity as a serial killer. After discovering her insatiable hunger for taking lives, she becomes unstoppable in her pursuit of feeding this urge. dorothy then goes on a victim tirade of how brutally women are treated in the justice system and how brutal everyone is to her. emma, being a weirdo just like dorothy, allows dorothy to assault her (almost) and get away with it.let's take the theme of murder and cannibalism, for example. the novel chooses to depict the murder that ends up sending dorothy to jail, as well as her four cases of cannibalism. she mentions several more murders she has committed as a side note. the novel discussed the why of cannibalism but for the murders, it gives little reason other than girlbossism (because women can be serial killers, too!). this cheapens the former - and it is a shame because i felt like the novel was truly on the precipice of saying something interesting and fascinating about it. well, this wasn't very good. i cannot even give if "good for her" points since there was nothing enjoyable to it. the main character was not simply unlikeable - which would have been fine - but completely insufferable by way of being both self-important and vapid. unfortunately, the novel never truly explores or shows this, in spite of being structured to do so. it is, once again, crippled by the inadequacies of the prose. Dorothy Daniels, a well-known American food critic turned serial killer, is a year into a life sentence at Bedford Hills Prison in New York, after getting away with murder — and cannibalism — for decades. Over 19 titled chapters, with headings such as Corpse Reviver #2, Banana Bread and Silage, Dorothy writes down her story from prison, longing, like all good sociopaths, to go down in history for her terrible crimes. Dorothy is a food critic. She loves her job; mostly because she believes her palette is perfect for the job. What the reader doesn’t know yet, and slowly gets to know is that she likes her murder and gore too.

this is the most white feminist book i've ever read. it was racist, grotesque, classist, antisemitic, and added nothing to any of the conversations it was desperately trying to grab onto. You won't soon forget Dorothy or her delicious insights, but fair warning: This book might turn you into a vegetarian, if you aren't already." - Library Journal (starred review) dorothy also compares herself, a white gentile woman, to anne frank, which is made even worse by something else we have to discuss later on regarding this book. One mark of psychopaths, or so I’ve learned, is that we calculate an action’s personal benefits before we take it, and it benefits me to proclaim my psychopathy, both in prison and out of it. Here at Bedford Hills, my psychopathy earns me a wide berth. There in the world, my psychopathy sells better than sex—and sex plus psychopathy, well, that’s a heady delight.You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway. I am a psychopath—and whatever their reasoning and whatever their diagnoses, the eager psychology and criminal justice students are right to study me. And if they’re wrong, I still enjoy their attention, and I’ll do what I must to encourage it. my final thoughts are this: i bought this book because i liked the cover. i adore things that look like alexandre cabanel's work. reading what it was about before i bought it, however, led me to know that i was going to be let down. i did not expect this book to be good.

this did not awaken anything in me simply because there was nothing to awaken. it did not make me wonder whether i would eat another person to survive or whether i would do it for some symbolic reason. it did not fill me with disgust nor with longing nor with thrill nor with excitement. we might as well have been discussing eating a rabbit. furthermore, how does emma not saying anything abt the many people dorothy killed show a sign of female friendship? isn't one of the earliest memories of this "friendship" dorothy having sex in emma's bed without her consent, thus making emma have to move out? so emma protects the person who tried to assault her and actively slaughtered a jewish man in the worst way possible, but we're supposed to think this is a great act of loyalty? frankly, emma and dorothy are both badly written characters who deserve no praise. Ugh, this book. Murderous, cannibalistic cougar food critic got my attention, but it was like the author stopped at that idea herself and never went further. Apparently this was meant to be a sort of “Hey, women can be evil, too” treatise, but instead of developing that idea we get chapter after chapter of our psychopathic narrator detailing all the food and sex she has, and the endless murders and consumption of her lovers.even if we were to ignore this, it is clear that the relationships that the novel chooses to highlight are central or at least relevant to the plot - the book is simplistic that way. however, in that regard it does a lot of telling and very little showing.