cannibalism may not be morally sound. but if you're willing to believe in yourself...it can be girlboss. Dazzling and gruesome, Chelsea G. Summers has written a gripping tour de force about female friendship, haute cuisine, and how to filet a man and serve him with fine Italian wine. I could not put it down." - Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood Shaw-Ellis, Daisy; Weir, Keziah (December 2, 2020). "The Books and Totes That Will Get You Through This Winter". Vanity Fair . Retrieved 2020-12-02.

A Certain Hunger,” Chelsea G. Summers’ debut novel, requires some chewing, and that is mostly — as Martha Stewart would put it — a good thing. Meet Dorothy Daniels, now 50-something and incarcerated at Bedford Hills, the supposedly upscale women’s prison in Connecticut where Stewart also did time, albeit for a different crime. Dorothy has a lot to say and at times her tangents about truffle hunting, prison cuisine and acrobatic love-making threaten to distract from the juicy marrow of her confessions. 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. How do you approach to talk about a book that you have “enjoyed” reading yet you truly wanted to hate it? The grotesque and carnal nature of the narrator makes you not just uncomfortable but her unapologetic confessions keep you hooked till the very end of it. It’s like eating delicious food but its extremely unhealthy full of fats and salts but you crave for more and just can’t resist taking another bite. These escapades are teed up with arresting, comic lines: “Giovanni. I killed him, and ate his liver. It was an accident, of course.” There is the sense throughout of a brave writer who pushes things to their limits. Nothing is sacred: “I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit. Children make me turn on the oven and reach for the rosemary.” As a woman psychopath, the white tiger of human psychological deviance, I am a wonder, and I relish your awe. 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.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. similarly, the meandering thoughts of the characters, the randomly sprinkled "truisims" about life, love, etc. are meant to be "deep" - you can tell they are - but since they do not say anything of substance, both the book and the character come off as self-important and superficial. What makes this so remarkable is the same choice skill that makes one cook better than another. Summers writes with humor and precision. It feels like fine dining with words, or at least verbal fusion cooking. Think of lingua al fredo, or maybe a salad of romans lettuce. It’s a cleverness that runs throughout. 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.

Any carnivore will tell you: Sometimes you enjoy a cut of meat more for its flavor than its tenderness. A rich bavette steak, a crisply fried pig’s ear, a long-simmered mutton roast. dorothy is the most bland character i have ever read. ever. and i read the bell jar, so that's saying something. 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. PDF / EPUB File Name: A_certain_hunger_-_Chelsea_G_Summers.pdf, A_certain_hunger_-_Chelsea_G_Summers.epub One of the most uniquely fun and campily gory books in my recent memory... A Certain Hunger has the voice of a hard-boiled detective novel, as if metaphor-happy Raymond Chandler handed the reins over to the sexed-up femme fatale and really let her fly." — The New York Times

A Certain Hunger

Then it just kept going on like that with the same flow of popping in and out of timelines, present to memory montage and I got really frustrated. I just wanted to know how she planned on ending her next lovers. This is the fake memoir of popular food critic Dorothy Daniels - she adores food, adores sex - oh and she happens to be a serial killer who eats parts of her victims!

Book Genre: Adult, Adult Fiction, Contemporary, Feminism, Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Mystery Thriller, Thriller, Womens here's how dorothy got caught, by the way: the supposedly intelligent psychopath threw away a receipt near the crime scene and forgot that trash cans don't magically melt when near a fire, unless they themselves are on fire. yet again, either a plothole or another showing of her stupidity, though i don't know which one makes me want to scream more. Okay, this book is about a woman embracing her inner self after decades of putting a lid on it... and so much more graphic. It's filled with dry humour, unhínged character behaviour and food getting in the middle of Dorothy's undoing, BUT it's addictive. the way i see it, the issue is twofold. on one side is the quality of the writing, the voice given to the character. the narrator is meant to be 51 but rather she sounds like someone who never got over their 20s. particularly telling is the use of sat-level words that do not weave into flow of the prose organically. where there should be sophistication of language, it is instead replaced by the enthusiasm of a freshly graduated highly educated person who wants to share sooo badly how many new words and cultural artefacts they have learned just to make you feel lesser to them. just about the worst kind of person - all show off, no pay off. As I say, there’s no reason an over-the-top sexploitation style story should be so thoughtfully rendered, but thank goodness it is.

Chelsea G. Summers

this is particularly egregious when it comes to the descriptions and discussion of cannibalism. i wouldn't have minded a casual tone from a psychopath, i would not expect anything else from commercial fiction. but this sanitised writing style somehow strips an inherently transgressive act off of its transgressiveness. Using a single point of view in a novel can heighten intensity, creating an immediate intimacy between character and reader. We learn to see the world through their eyes. This approach is particularly effective when the character is someone who lives outside the confines of society, as is the case with the charming sociopathic narrator of Chelsea G Summers’ debut novel A Certain Hunger. To this, I laughed. I know what I am. It may not appear in the DSM-5, but just because you can’t prescribe a pill for us doesn’t mean we don’t exist. When I was very young—long before I ever lost my virginity or even kissed a boy, around twelve, I think—I had a vision. I imagined throwing a lavish affair, a sort of punctuation mark on my adult life. I saw myself inviting all my lovers, present and past, to a dinner party. I knew even as puberty was dawning, fluffy and pointed as a kitten, that my life would be rich with men. These men, I imagined, would be plentiful, interesting, attractive, and, above all, devout. For the first time in more than a decade, I have a job—you can’t freelance in prison.