Hungry Ghost by Victoria Ying

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hungry Ghost by Victoria Ying Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Ying, Victoria Hungry Ghost; written and illus. by Victoria Ying. First Second, 2023 [208p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250766991 $24.99 Paper ed. ISBN 9781250767004 $17.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-12 Valerie’s mother has made it very clear that a good daughter is a thin daughter, and so the high school senior girl has been purging for years to meet her mom’s standards. Val has managed to keep it a secret from both friends and family, but thoughts about food and her body take up most of her mental energy, and even her enjoyment of a school trip to Paris is impacted by her obsession with carbs and other women’s appearance. When her father dies in a plane crash, however, she begins to reconsider what the physicality of a body really means: “Will people care that much about my body when I die . . . How can this thing, this thing that I hate—how could anyone care about it that much?” Thus begins her attempts to disentangle beliefs about her worth from her mother’s opinions about thinness, food, and personal value. Ying gives readers an authentic, layered portrayal of disordered eating in both Val and her mother, sympathetic to each woman but also not letting them off the hook for their own contributions to a fatphobic society obsessed with making body size a moral measuring stick. Readers see Val visibly recoil at her mother’s criticisms of Val’s best friend, but later Val voices those same opinions, [End Page 238] nearly destroying a longtime friendship with the belief that she is simply a better person than her larger friend. A subdued palette of pinks, violets, and grays keep the focus on body language and expressions, and the visual disconnect between Val’s internal dialogue and what she presents to the rest of the world is heartbreakingly painful. Ying wisely avoids detailing the specifics of Val’s disordered eating, but instead focuses on the idea of what sustains a life, both physically and emotionally, and how stripping a body of one inevitably takes the other. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois