Everything about this book was incredible. I was completely engaged with those characters, even as I tried to match them with fairy tales and wondered about what Will was really up to.

That these women’s stories have elements of the fantastic, it’s little wonder that they either hide from or rail against the injustice of it all.Īdelmann has crafted a brilliant narrative that explored how women are portrayed in the media and gossiped about by society in a way that stays grounded in a cast of fascinating characters. The fact that their sometimes very traumatic pasts have been turned into entertainment just adds insult to injury. Like so many real women who appear in the news, the public question their choices, blame victims, or speculate about ulterior motives. They are all heartily sick (or constantly retraumatized) by having the public at large telling simplified-and mostly wrong-versions of events. Group therapy is a chance for all of these women to finally get their stories heard, if only by their therapist Will (who we learn has his own secrets). It doesn’t take much to crack their facades. All of these women are barely maintaining the appearance of normalcy. The emails eventually wear them down and, in short order, we meet Bernice, who went into the one room her rich boyfriend told her not to Ruby, who wears a wolfskin coat almost as heavy as her attitude brittle-bright Ashlee, who won a Bachelor-style reality show called The One Gretel, whose brother has very different memories of what happened when their impoverished parents abandoned them and the mysterious Raina, a motherly woman nursing secret regrets in spite of her apparently perfect life. It takes several emails to get them to attend since, for the most part, these women don’t want to talk about what happened and prefer to keep the lowest of profiles. Readers, I inhaled this book.įive women receive a series of emails that invite them to private group therapy. I just couldn’t resist a book in which five women who lived through traumatic events that strangely resemble fairy tales are invited to participate in group therapy.

When I saw reviews for Maria Adelmann’s How to Be Eaten I jumped at the chance to read it. I especially love it when authors take the metafictional route and put characters into group therapy to talk through their issues (as in The Final Girls Support Group and Lost in a Good Book).

I have a fascination with books that look at what happens after-after the Big Bad has been taken down and the lovers have gotten together and all that.

How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann