Reviews with content warning for Racism - A Certain Hunger

Reviews tagging 'Racism'

A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers

13 reviews

queerfucker's review

challenging dark funny reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

overall a great book exploring gender and sex one painstaking cut of meat at a time. It can get a little bit unneeded in areas of euphemisms but i get its supposed to be a person desperate to shock you ? Some antisemitism/lesbophobia but I can genuinely chalk it up to the authors age as my mom from gen x has said some weird shit until i corrected her in an innocent way not knowing it’s outdated.

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reynasimone's review

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dark funny tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

The writing style made the first few chapters hard to get through, but I think it was a deliberate choice to add character to the narration. After awhile it becomes more bearable but it persists throughout the book. I found the main character unlikable and frustrating.

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mmefish's review

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Not only it's blatantly racist and anti-Semitic (you can't just say "my character is a psychopath" and pretend that it makes anything you write OK), it's also laughably edgy, overwritten and unnecessary vulgar in relations to sex.

Includes gems like:

"In an arc as perfect as a fifteen-year-old girl's breast [...]"

And

"I imagined the relief after my hymen broke [...]"

For the love of god, learn your own body's anatomy.

Chelsea Summers writes women as Men-Writing-Women write women. In what world this piece of garbage is feminist?

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russejenn's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I could not get over the pretentious writing. I understand that the author was trying to show the egocentrism of this character, but it was obnoxious to read. Also, I don’t eat meat, and so the constant describing of food had me feeling grossed out and bored (not the cannibalism, the actual food). Finally, I was really uncomfortable with the way that she talked about the ONLY POC in this book. She describes her dreadlocks as Medusa snakes, and basically has nothing nice to say, and then literally in the next chapter she is praising how beautiful her blond lawyer is. Maybe it was an intentional choice, but then she starts talking about her white privilege in prison as if she’s woke, so I’m not sure that it was. Regardless, I didn’t like it.

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slintangel's review

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challenging dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

i know youre all illiterate cause how are you screaming girlboss at a woman committing a hate crime

shit book about a pretentious prick who tries to use feminism and patriarchal oppression as the reason why she killed men who did not even wrong her in any way. pass.

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angievansprang's review against another edition

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Ultimately, the discussion of cannibalism and it’s supposed “origin” in West African cultures is ignorant and uneducated for a book that so desperately wishes to be pompous, pretentious, and over-intellectualized. I specifically stopped reading at a section where the author/main character discuss william seabrook and his book the magic island which from a quick Google, I am pretty sure paints West African indigenous peoples as not only cannibals but also zombies which is baseline racist to say the absolute least. From reading other reviews, I learned that later in the book, our main character

kills an ex lover named Marco who is Jewish in “kosher style” because he no longer wants to fuck her. I also learned that the book contains an on-page anti-Semitic slur later on as well as a description of the main character’s “intrigue” around her own sexual assault.

Additionally, I found it absurd to hear this author’s discussion of the “unjust” conditions of incarceration as the main character is an extremely privileged white woman *GUILTY OF MULTIPLE CASES OF MURDER AND CANNIBALISM* after recently having read Angela Davis’ autobiography which details the real oppression she faced in the American incarcerate system as a Black woman on no grounds whatsoever. This book certainly strikes me as exclusionary white feminism at it’s core and I would not recommend it.

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blackcatkai's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

CW: blood, violence, antisemitism, murder, ableism, fatphobia, food/body shaming, classism, racism (slurs and otherwise), sexual content, rape and other types of sexual assault/harassments, gore, animal cruelty and death, sexism, gaslighting, infidelity, alcohol and drug use, passages that may read a bit homophobic and/or transphobic

no. i get that it's supposed to be a satire overall and youre not meant to like the main character, but my biggest issue was how boring the entire novel is. and technically, it's only a satire in regards to the universe of food in real life, not the sexism or murder or sex or society as a whole or whatever. so maybe if it had JUST been about that, it would've been more successful for me. then the character of Dorothy would've read better with her vapid, self important, condescending, holier than thou bullshit. but not here, not when you throw in everything else.

pacing? all over the place, mainly slow. cannibalism and violence? well, its THERE, technically? but it takes forever to get to the gruesome bits and then theyre lackluster at best. this doesnt feel feminist or inclusive or a biting commentary on anything other than narcissists suck. there's also a ton of nuanced information presented in a non-nuanced way that feels like im reading an incomplete wikipedia page with no sources and missing key context. we get it, the author learned about a lot of things and wanted us to know about them, even if some info was left out, leading to what feels like misinformation, even in a fictional story.

this is more a book about gratuitous sex, fancy food, and trips to europe because its the best (except new york city, of course) than it is about cis-female empowerment, cannibalism, or violence. its repetitive use of simile, speaking down to the reader, and infodumps, left me disengaged, bored, and desperate for the end.

basically, this book was not for me, and im so glad its finally over. thank you.

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