What Hunger

by Catherine Dang

ARC Review

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: August 12, 2025

When food can’t satisfy your hunger and rage is more powerful than grief. That’s the space What Hunger lives in.

Ronny is just a girl on the edge of high school. The world around her is already cracking when something violent, brutal, and life-altering happens. It carves out a new kind of hunger in her body that has nothing to do with food and everything to do with grief, rage, and survival.

This story is powerful for putting out there the terrible things that happen in this young person’s life and giving her a voice without having her use her words… maybe just her teeth.

For me, this wasn’t a horror novel in the traditional sense. There’s no fantasy or magic here. The “horror” is real life, being a girl, a sister, a daughter in a world that fails you. The raw meat, the violence, the craving, it’s all grounded in what she’s been through. Rage becomes the force that moves the story. And this rage festers until she is ready to let it scream.

I also want to say: although this story could happen in a variety of settings, the Vietnamese-American identity in this book isn’t just a backdrop it’s central. The food, the pressure, and the grief, it all felt lived-in and deeply understood. The way meals mark her shifting inner world is so smart. Before, during, after.. you feel the change. That one bowl of pho says more than pages of dialogue ever could.

What stayed with me most was how she never really lost her strength. There’s a moment when everything breaks open, but with the realization that you’re not the only one holding something heavy. That maybe your rage isn’t only yours. And maybe that’s what helps you survive.

This isn’t a light read. There’s grief, trauma, and violence. But it’s not hopeless. It’s not exploitative. It’s a story about power, about carrying what others couldn’t say out loud, and about finding your own way through it.

It’s devastating and empowering at so many levels.  Tartare anyone?

Thank you #NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the early read.

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