Woman, Eating

November 1, 2021

Poor Lydia is hungry. She can't eat the sashimi and ramen her Japanese human father might have favored, but the fresh pig's blood she can digest is hard to find now that she's living away from her vampire mother and trying to make it as an artist in London. And she's lonely, too, despite the proximity of customers at the gallery where she works and her fellow artists, including charming Ben; if she gets too close, she'll want to suck them dry. This first work by British Japanese violinist Kohda generated big book and film rights interest; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2022
A Gen Z vampire suffers an identity crisis. Lydia--a 23-year-old vampire of Japanese, Malaysian, and British descent who recently graduated art school--is excited to move to London and get a place of her own, but after dropping off her addled mother--also a vampire, and Lydia's sire--at the Crimson Orchard nursing facility in Margate, little goes according to plan. Her single suitcase of belongings goes missing. Her unpaid gallery internship consists of nothing but bizarre busywork and unwanted advances from her lecherous boss. She has no idea what type of artist she wants to be, the boy she likes is dating someone else, and nobody in the city sells fresh pig's blood, which is the only substance her self-loathing mum ever permitted the two of them to consume. ("Pigs are dirty. It's what your body deserves.") Lonely, listless, and starving, Lydia spends nights and weekends holed up in her windowless studio, bingeing Buffy the Vampire Slayer and watching YouTube videos of strangers eating, desperate for the kind of connection to the Earth and other people that actual food allows humans to feel. Debut author Kohda makes clever use of her premise to explore weighty topics--including cultural alienation, disordered eating, emotional abuse, sexual assault, the stressors of navigating adulthood, and caring for an aging parent--with sensitivity. Though aimless to start, Lydia's achingly vulnerable first-person narration gains momentum as she achieves self-acceptance--and, ultimately, self-empowerment. Subversive and gratifying.

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February 21, 2022
Kohda’s delicious debut introduces a young performance artist whose centuries-old mother made her into a vampire as an infant. Lydia, 23, was raised on her mother Julie’s self-hating rhetoric and Julie’s belief that they “didn’t deserve to feel satiated.” Her human father, who was a famous Japanese artist, died before her birth, leaving Lydia feeling isolated from both her Japanese and human heritage. When Julie’s declining memory makes assisted living necessary, Lydia sets out on her own with a new art studio space in London—unsure whether to continue following her mother’s regimen, which called for pig’s blood instead of human. Kohda gets off to a slow start, plodding through Lydia’s move into her studio and an unfulfilling internship at a gallery. But things pick up after Lydia’s store of pig’s blood runs out and she begins compulsively watching #WhatIEatInADay videos. Here, Kodha palpably conveys Lydia’s disconnection from the human experiences she so desperately wants, and after Lydia takes her first taste of human blood (from a towel used to clean up after a bike accident), she instantly feels all-powerful. The pace quickens, bounding toward a thrilling end, as Lydia questions whether to run from or honor her legacy. Once this gets going, it’s great fun. Agent: Sam Copeland, RCW Literary.

March 1, 2022
Mother-daughter relationships are fraught enough even when the parties are not vampires. In this inventive and charming first novel that's more What We Do in the Shadows than Twilight (with resemblances to Milk Fed [2021] and My Year of Rest and Relaxation [2018]), Kohda explores loss--physical, cultural, and personal--and how, demons or not, humans can suck the life out of each other. We expect, we take, we project our feelings on others. As a multiracial London vampire who has just left home, Lydia feels uprooted from her various identities. Food is intrinsic to Asian culture, but she cannot eat anything other than blood. She is not quite alive, and yet she will live forever. She is an artist who must create, but she is in constant fear that she'll destroy in order to sustain herself. To be a vampire, she muses, is not unlike being a woman in a society in which one is either pure or impure, human or monster. Kohda has created a provocative, sympathetic, and satisfying dive into the mind of an unusual young woman at a crossroads.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 1, 2022

DEBUT Presenting a genuinely fresh take on the vampire mythos is an exceedingly difficult task in a post-Twilight world of bloodsucker rehash, not to mention enduring classic representation, but that's precisely what Kohda manages in her debut novel. An artist born to a vampire mother and a human father, recently transplanted to the city where she begins an internship at a gallery and feels haunted by a predatory male superior, Lydia lives at the nexus of several different worlds. But while such a synopsis might suggest a work primed for melodrama, Kohda instead executes her narrative with practiced restraint reflective of her protagonist's own reticence in navigating a new existence. Indeed, Lydia's circumstance is never handled sensationally but rather mined for its mundanity: how best to avoid eating at a dinner party with peers, for instance, or where to discreetly obtain pig's blood in her new neighborhood. Kohda likewise smartly resists pat analogy, allowing vampirism to become more a texture to Lydia's growing pains than a guiding metaphor, and the only real consideration of lore is a brilliant subversion: for Lydia, the very act of "feeding" becomes an act of pure empathy. This loose, even defiant approach to narrative expectations can leave the novel feeling a bit slight, but that's a minor quibble. More books, vampire-themed or otherwise, could stand to feel this intimate. VERDICT A delicate, consistently surprising riff on the vampire narrative, and a stealthy, subversive story of one young woman's declaration of self.--Luke Gorham

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.