OptionalBooks

Delicious, but could've used a couple more minutes in the oven

After Ji-won's dad left for another woman, it didn't take her mother long to also find someone new: George. But Ji-won and her little sister Ji-hyun see what there mother doesn't, that George is a racist and sexist piece of shit. As her mother keeps deluding herself and her sister keeps suffering powerlessly, Ji-won develops a mad appetite for human eyes that could free the three women of their oppressor.

This novel manages to paint a hateable, yet believable villain in George. His racism against and fetishization of Asian women gets your blood boiling early and makes you long for the catharsis that the title and blurb on the back of the book promise. To avoid serving its just deserts too early, the book instead invites us to follow Jin-won's slow descent into madness, which makes her later actions much more believable. At points, this descent is a bit too slow and some of the fat could've been trimmed.

Next to the main course I teased in the opening paragraph, we are also offered a smorgasbord of additional characters and digressions, which mostly succeed in expanding the palette and layering some additional complexity onto the characters and story. Jealousy, academic pressure, friendship, and even a bit of romance find their way into the story.

Still, there were some sour notes. Many passages could have used another pass to fix some clumsy text flow or switch out repeated phrases. A second edition could hopefully take care of couple of typos, a paragraph that was right-aligned when it shouldn't have been, and the worst and most baffling choice in layout I've ever seen: To use block text, but instead of adjusting the spacing in between words to fill the line, the spacing between letters grows and shrinks, making some lines r e a d l i k e t h i s. That almost drove me to such levels of madness as the ones our protagonist reaches.

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