I kind of can’t believe how much I liked this. Sometimes you just have to try new things! I do not recommend that the new thing you try be eating human eyeballs, as our MC is into, but like, try some pig ear soup! Or some menudo. You never had jackfruit? Try some jackfruit (had to throw something in for the vegans). You know! Or like me. Reading a book about a woman who looooooves eating eyeballs, a thing most versions of past me would not have believed I would do, let alone enjoy.
I sat on this review for a little bit because I wanted to see what my subconscious could do with the story after a little stewing (pun not intended—don’t stew eyeballs) and I’m glad I did that, because it has indeed settled in my head, and I think if I read it again, I would bump up my rating even higher.
The Eyes are the Best Part opens with Ji-won and her sister Ji-hyun witnessing their mother falling apart after their father left weeks before. The family is Korean American, both parents are immigrants, and the girls were born in the US. Their father leaving has thrown their lives into chaos. This also coincides with some changes for Ji-won, who is a freshman at college, and is dealing with growing pains of her own. Soon her mother begins dating a man named George, who is clearly an Asian fetishist, and Ji-won begins dreaming and then imagining (and then putting into practice) eating the blue eyeballs of men.
The blurb says the books is about a female serial killer in the making from a Korean American perspective, and that’s accurate, because it’s just as much about Ji-won dealing with being treated and feeling differently due to her race and gender (with a little bit of class thrown in for good measure; her family is poor) as it is about her becoming a murderous monster fixated on eating eyeballs. And the two things are not unrelated!
Something that initially kept me from giving the book five stars is that my brain was having a hard time making the connection between the eyeball eating and the clearly literary-leaning rest of the book, that so accurately and incisively pokes at the social structures Ji-won is straining against, at the men who look at Asian women and see nothing but sex, at the rest of society that puts Asian Americans into very defined categories and doesn’t allow for them to make mistakes (Ji-won is not a good student, doesn’t get into Berkley like her friends, and is put on academic probation in her first semester of college, just to name a few things). Anyway, so I jokingly suggested halfway through the book while trying to piece this all together, is the eyeball eating, is it the gaze??? And you know, it absolutely is. It just took my brain a bit to get there, and this interview from the author solidifies it. She absolutely did this on purpose.
Anyway, I highly, highly recommend this book. The unhinged main character, her outrageous actions, the incisive social commentary, all of it works. I can’t wait to see what Monika Kim does next, I will definitely be here for it.
[4.5 stars]
SUMMERWEEN 2024
CBR BINGO 2024: Dreams (you prob don’t want me to tell you about her dreams, but she has a LOT of them, and they are very important to the story)
Oh, also, hi Emmalita! I have used my free space on ‘Detente’ 🙂
