BookBrowse Reviews What Hunger by Catherine Dang

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A Vietnamese American teenage girl navigates complex family dynamics in the wake of a tragedy, and discovers that she has a taste for human flesh.

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It's the summer before Veronica "Ronny" Nguyen starts high school sometime in the early 2000s, and her brother Tommy has just graduated as valedictorian. Tommy is the pride of Ronny's Vietnamese American family: he's popular, he gets good grades, he has a promising future as he plans to attend the "Harvard of Missouri." Ronny herself feels painfully average in comparison, but she loves her older brother—he bears the brunt of their parents' hopes and aspirations for the future of the family as their past (largely unspoken of in the Nguyen household) is mired in the weight of the Vietnam War.

Ronny doesn't understand the details of what her parents went through, but she knows that whatever horrors they endured have cast a veil between their generation and Ronny and her brother's. "Though we were born afterward, we existed only because South Vietnam had lost, because life had changed for our parents, because desperation had made them run. The war had destroyed their lives and made ours," Ronny tells us.

When a sudden tragedy rips their family apart, Ronny passes her summer in a numb haze and starts her freshman year with a heavy heart. In an attempt to feel like a normal teenager, she sneaks out one night to attend a party hosted by the most popular boy in school. What starts out as a typical high school rager turns nightmarish when Ronny is sexually assaulted. In retaliation, she bites the boy's earlobe off—and finds, to her surprise, that she doesn't mind the taste. This encounter awakens something in Ronny, who starts to sneak pieces of raw meat when her parents aren't looking, to satiate her newfound desire. But she finds that her cravings run deeper, tugging at a primal urge within her.

The relationship between Vietnamese culture and food is explored at length by Dang. Though Ronny's parents speak very little of their past in Vietnam, they teach their children about Vietnamese cuisine—pho tai, nem chua, spring rolls, roast beef. Ronny's desire for flesh, macabre as it is, comes to be understood by the reader as something inherited: a literalization of the trauma endured by her parents.

"There were people who thought it was cruel to eat meat—the direct flesh of another living being. [...] But that was how we'd done it. That was how we'd survived as a species in our different corners of the earth, no matter how hot or cold our surroundings, no matter how much or how little there was to eat. For the billions of people who existed and who had once existed, meat was a means of survival. It was culture and it was heritage. And for me, it was Vietnamese."

As Ronny lashes out in the wake of her assault and puts herself in increasingly dangerous situations to seek revenge on the boy who hurt her and to satisfy her hunger, she also finds herself testing her limits with her parents. Things come to a breaking point in a confrontation with her mother when she finally learns about the harrowing circumstances in which her parents fled Vietnam, information that recontextualizes everything Ronny thought she knew about her family. The Vietnam War—once just a shadow hanging over her household—finally feels to Ronny as alive as the meat she craves.

With echoes of Jennifer's Body (the cult classic film about a teenage girl who becomes a man-eating demon), What Hunger fuses a traditional coming-of-age narrative with a poignant exploration of intergenerational trauma. Catherine Dang navigates themes of cultural identity, the lasting effects of war, and adolescent feminine rage in a novel that is at times heartbreaking, at times funny, and wholly unforgettable. It should be approached with caution by readers who have particularly sensitive stomachs, as some of the descriptions are incredibly visceral, but this is the rare novel that can be appreciated by historical fiction fans and horror fans alike, as Dang sacrifices neither angle in a project that thematically coalesces seamlessly.

This review first ran in the August 13, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.