A Certain Hunger: Chelsea G. Summers

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Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy's clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about. Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both.

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. I don’t mind reading from the POV of a psychopath, but it’s a sin to force your reader to endure the POV of a *boring* psychopath. Dorothy describes herself as a “howling void” and the point is that she doesn’t have a soul, but it’s more appropriate because she doesn’t have a personality. She expresses the same three ideas ad nauseum until the very, very end when she says one thing that could have been a sustainable thesis for this book. But again, it wasn’t developed.

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. It didn’t take long for the forensic psychology and criminal justice students to start fluttering to me, like common gray moths to a bonfire. Two weeks after I’d landed at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, and I’d received my first interview request from a Ph.D. candidate. One request became two, then three, then more. Like hail dropping from the sky, eager students fell before me, jostling each other for my attention. It was delightful to be so avidly courted by so many keenly interested young things. I felt like the belle of the carceral ball. In my jejune imagination, my dream lovers were uniform, each as beautiful, masculine, and replaceable as an Arrow shirt model. 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. Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy's clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about.

in comparison, 'a certain hunger' pretends it offers a lot but offers nothing of substance in reality. it is - and i cannot say this enough - vapid, shallow. where its themes and topic call for complexity, it chooses an outdated simplistic view (e.g. feminity and gender - what does it have to offer that even tumblr darlings of ten years ago have not already offered?) it is giving #girlboss, it is giving #empowerment in the most uncritical uncomplex manner possible. Dorothy Daniels has all the time in her hand because she is literally in a prison pen on her “gastronomic journey” where she travels around the whole hunting for the best kosher meat to truffle to men…. to eat. Umm yes. To eat. She loves well cooked perfectly seasoned prime rib and brisket of her old lover. 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. Silverberg notes too that A Certain Hunger is "also a history of the internet, and how it has democratized writing and ‘steamrolled the playing field’ of criticism broadly." [4] Style [ edit ] 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.a b c Livingstone, Josephine (2020-11-18). "When the Protagonist Is a Literal Man-Eater". The New Republic. ISSN 0028-6583 . Retrieved 2020-12-02. 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!

There’s gristle in her toothsome tale. Dorothy has had certain other hungers too. The reader has become a willing victim, following her along, but finally she thrusts a metaphorical shiv: She did find love, near-perfect love, and it scared her nearly to death. “I like being by myself, you see. I just didn’t want to be alone. And now I never will be,” she says; now she’s in prison for life. 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 Conversation With Chelsea G. Summers, Author Of 'A Certain Hunger' ". Audible.com. December 10, 2019 . Retrieved December 2, 2020. I didn’t know what I was expecting when I started reading this book; but honestly what I got wasn’t it 👀 Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations. It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.”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.

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. If I’d known what I was getting into, I wouldn’t have started. Thank goodness I didn’t know, though, because, in ways that are hard to describe, Summers is a brilliant prose stylist.Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both. This article needs an improved plot summary. Please help improve the plot summary. ( December 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)