Dorothy Daniels is a food critic. Not just any, mind you: one of the best of the best. A master at describing culinary delights and winning over the minds of intellectual foodies, Dorothy loves her job. Her other passion? Men, in any and every form. Spending her time between New York and Italy, passionately eating at the best restaurants and seducing men, Dorothy is just like anyone else. Aside from the fact that she is bitingly clever and independent, of course -- and happens to be a cannibal.
I'd been looking forward to reading this, seeing as I adore unlikable female protagonists and what some might categorize as "nasty" literature. I don't mind grotesquery, as long as it's cleverly done and serving some sort of narrative purpose. Summers excels at this sort of quasi-pretension, rife with vulgarity, and her writing can't be described as anything but decadent and beautiful. Many people will probably be put off by the frank, semi-disgusting descriptions of sex and murder, but for me, the combination of the elegant and the repulsive worked wonderfully.
Dorothy, our antiheroine, is not likable. Period. There's no ifs, ands or buts about it, and I applaud Summers for both making her an interesting, readable narrator, but also not falling into the trap of trying to make her sympathetic or relatable. In spite of the fact that she's an unrepentant murderer, cannibal and generally bad person, it's both a little frightening and strangely fun to be trapped inside her head for the duration of this narrative.
The story is told in a disjointed fashion, going from flashbacks of her murders (as well as affording us some small pictures of her adolescence and childhood) to the present day. Although some people dislike books told in a nonlinear fashion, I don't mind it, and I actually felt that it helped us to get an idea of what it might be like in Dorothy's head as she reminisces. All other characters are purposely rendered in a somewhat one-dimensional way, telling us that Dorothy sees them as little more than objects, dolls to move around in her own personal playhouse. The one person she actually seems to love and view as another being on her level is her best friend, Emma, who is actually painted quite vividly; she could make for an interesting narrator in her own book.
So, by now you're probably wondering... why only three stars, then? Well, to put it simply, there were some things that left a bad taste in my mouth (pun not intended). Yes, Dorothy is a psychopath, a cannibal, and a murderer -- she is not intended as a moral compass by any stretch of the imagination. But during the course of the tale, Dorothy ends up meeting Kiandra Wasserman, a black woman and police detective. Their meetings felt oddly racialized to me, particularly because every time Dorothy encounters her, she compares Kiandra to animals (most often ponies, but regardless, it didn't strike me quite right). To be fair, she often describes other characters in unflattering, often animalistic or food-adjacent terms, but with Wasserman's character, it is essentially every single time.
Summers also has Dorothy describe Kiandra with a word that is outdated, offensive, and frankly baffled me. I hate to repeat the term here, but I don't want anyone to make assumptions about what it might be, so I'll put it here: J*wess. I believe that Summers has a Jewish father, so I feel it's only fair to include that information, but as I'm not Jewish I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes. She also seems fixated on Kiandra's dreadlocks, and the descriptions of them sometimes struck me as strange and unpleasant.
I understand that, perhaps, this is Summers giving us a taste of Dorothy's own biases, but it strikes me as odd, because in other parts of the narrative Dorothy tells us she's aware of her privileges as a white woman (although just because one is aware of those privileges does not mean you don't use them for your benefit, or still hold implicit biases anyways). She also says some slightly cruel things about other women and womanhood, but I think that's fair game, considering she herself is a woman.
All in all, I can't exactly recommend it in good faith because of those elements that left me feeling a bit uneasy. I welcome thoughts and further discussion on these issues!
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