What Hunger By Catherine Dang. Published by Simon & Schuster, 2025.

Catherine Dang’s What Hunger is a first-person thriller that hinges on the relatability of its protagonist, fourteen-year-old, Vietnamese-American Ronny Nguyen. As What Hunger begins, Ronny is on the precipice of entering high school, but her life is turned upside down when her brother is killed in a hit-and-run accident in mid-July.

In all of the ways that What Hunger delivers a deliciously unique concept, we are trapped, as readers, to witness it through the eyes of Ronny Nguyen. Ronny is trapped, as a character, in genre fiction – forced to become the focal point of What Hunger. A novel certainly does not need a relatable character to be successful, but Ronny is structured as if she is relatable to the audience. She is not, not because of her character niches, but because, across the novel, she is a profoundly confused character. The novel’s main selling point as a “thriller” is that it takes strides to make audiences root for human cannibalism. When Ronny is raped early on in Dang’s novel and bites the ear off of her assailant, she develops a taste for human blood as she swirls the ear around in her mouth. This assault-inspired hunger would go on to lead the rest of the novel: “I could feel the gnawing in my stomach, like a hand reaching for more—” (Dang 100). 

Ronny’s appetite throughout What Hunger begins to change her and influence her decisions:

I only wanted the fresh, raw beef from the phở tái. I wanted the tang of blood on my tongue and the soft touch of flesh between my teeth . . . . So I improvised. I ate three of the cold nem chua as if they were sticks of jerky. And I found an old package of pink lunch meat in the fridge. I shoved as many slices in my mouth as I could. There was no blood, but it was better than nothing. And I chewed so quickly, I gave myself the hiccups […] I got embarrassed. This was more humiliating than the romance books. I knew how sloppy I looked, scarfing down lunch meat like a pig. It was abnormal. It would have made Tommy worried about me. (124)

This hunger is where the novel shifts. Ronny is originally a caricature of teenage life, and that works: “I liked to imagine myself in high school—the cute clothes I would wear, the boyfriends I would have, the groups of friends I would see, all the clubs that I would join. It seemed so glamorous” (51). Ronny was not unique as a protagonist, but she was recognizable. When she changed, though, she lost her defining trait: relatability. She becomes Jennifer Check from Jennifer’s Body. A novel written from the point of Jennifer Check may seem enticing, but it is not relatable, as she is not a relatable character – neither is Ronny Nguyen.

In the ad that originally turned my eyes onto this novel, Jennifer’s Body was brought up alongside it, explicitly stating it was “[…] for fans of Jennifer’s Body.” The comparison between Ronny and Jennifer is, at least for advertising purposes, intentional; this comparison, however, does not succeed. If the point of What Hunger was to create a “relatable” Jennifer, one would have to create an all-new character. Ronny has some late-novel moments of pure and untempered malice that lead her towards unrelatability and other, early-novel moments that lead her towards pure genre-stereotype. Ronny does not generally work as a relatable character, and she does not work as a stand in for Jennifer.

When Ronny’s brother dies early on in the novel, she has a moment where she wishes that her brother’s killer, who survived the hit-and-run accident, died in the hospital: “Somebody needed to go to the hospital, straight to the driver’s room. They needed to smash the machines and yank the cords inside. They needed to open the window, rolling out the hospital bed at full speed. The driver could go splat into the concrete” (40). This moment demonstrates perfectly, through grief, who Ronny would have become if she had, perhaps, been a more relatable character. Though dark, her thoughts demonstrate the shining moments within What Hunger that are few and far between.

What Hunger is not a poor novel. Its plot is profoundly interesting and its prose, at times, had me at the edge of my seat, but through it all, its main character couldn’t decide who she wanted to be. I hungered for a relatability that was simply absent from a novel that hinged on it.