Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

 

Lydia is a young woman making her way in London as an art intern in a galley.  She is half human, half vampire.  Her father who she idolized was human, her mother vampire. Lydia had been born sickly and her mother turned her in the pediatric ICU in order to save her life.  Her mother is still alive, currently residing in an assisted living facility.  She is self-despising and has raised Lydia to be the same.  But Lydia questions if she should hate herself.

It's hard to be a vampire if you don't want to kill humans.  Lydia subsists on a diet of dried pig blood or fresh when she can find a butcher who has it.  But lately as she adjusts to living on her own, she wonders if that is the only thing she can have.  What about other animals?  What about, dare she think it, humans?  Lydia has an encounter with another artist, Ben, and the closeness of sex makes her wonder about expanding her diet to include humans.  

This is an interesting novel.  The author is English and this is her debut novel.  It explores the relationship of humans to food, the fact that we must eat in order to live but is it moral to eat other beings in order for us to survive?  Is it another form of exploitation that humans feel safe to make, assuming their lives are superior?  It also explores the difficulty of being other in our society.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.