destiny ♡ howling libraries's Reviews > Hungry Ghost

Apparently I'm on a roll with the tough reads today, because Hungry Ghost is a painful one for sure. It follows a teen girl named Val whose mother's constant body-shaming and food obsessions have gradually pushed her to the point of disordered eating. Don't go into this expecting a perfect protagonist who heals easily or quickly, or views the world in the right ways, because we definitely get to see how broken her perspective is at times, especially when she even begins to body-shame her fat best friend.

As a fat person with a long history of disordered eating, stories like this can carry an extra layer of pain because of the combination of ED rep mixed with the main character's fatphobic views of those around them, but I'm really glad that I kept going, because Val grows so much as a character within these pages and I was absolutely rooting for her all the while. I only wish we had seen some sort of character growth from her mother, anything at all, but unfortunately, that isn't always how these things go.

Thank you to the publisher for the review copy! All thoughts are honest and my own.

✨ Representation: Val and her family are Asian-American

✨ Content warnings for: (view spoiler)[fatphobia, body-shaming, disordered eating, vague depictions of vomiting, purging, loss of a parent, grief, verbally abusive parent (hide spoiler)]

———
twitter | booktok | bookstagram | blog