A review by venusfawn
Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love by Elsie Chapman
2.0
I really wanted to love this book; I mean it’s an anthology based around food. Sadly, most of the stories felt very flat to me but what really ruined this anthology was the wild lack of cohesion.
Once I began reading I realized that all the stories were set in the same town, and were supposed to be interconnected. Every story referenced a person or place from another story. This in itself is a really cool idea for an anthology, but the genres in this book were all over the place. There was magical realism and straight contemporary, and then horror and fantasy and violent drama. This would’ve been fine if the goal wasn’t an interwoven collection of stories. There was a story featuring ghosts, and another that had honest to god superheroes. It felt completely out of left field and was a bit confusing to read among the other stories.
My very favorite stories in this were Kings and Queens by Elsie Chapman and The Missing Ingredient by Rebecca Roanhorse; though as much as I liked them I have to admit they didn’t quite fit in with the other stories that well either. They were the best written and most interesting of them all though, in my opinion. Rain by Sangu Mandanna was also very good. The rest to me were either a bit “meh,” and there were a couple I didn’t enjoy at all. I’m so disappointed that I didn’t love this, since I was really excited to read it.
Once I began reading I realized that all the stories were set in the same town, and were supposed to be interconnected. Every story referenced a person or place from another story. This in itself is a really cool idea for an anthology, but the genres in this book were all over the place. There was magical realism and straight contemporary, and then horror and fantasy and violent drama. This would’ve been fine if the goal wasn’t an interwoven collection of stories. There was a story featuring ghosts, and another that had honest to god superheroes. It felt completely out of left field and was a bit confusing to read among the other stories.
My very favorite stories in this were Kings and Queens by Elsie Chapman and The Missing Ingredient by Rebecca Roanhorse; though as much as I liked them I have to admit they didn’t quite fit in with the other stories that well either. They were the best written and most interesting of them all though, in my opinion. Rain by Sangu Mandanna was also very good. The rest to me were either a bit “meh,” and there were a couple I didn’t enjoy at all. I’m so disappointed that I didn’t love this, since I was really excited to read it.