Review available at: cthulhuville.com/2024/05/30/the-eyes-are-the-best-part/

Reading this I couldn’t help but liken it to the Japanese and Korean horror movies I grew up watching. Monika Kim took her time setting up the story, building to an eventual tipping point almost halfway into the book where things eventually took a turn and started the descent into the psychological horror story that is this book. In The Eyes are the Best Part we follow Ji-won, a Korean-American college student dealing with her parents’ divorce, navigation through the first year of college, and an ever growing craving to eat eyes.

It starts harmless enough, finally trying a fish eye after being asked to for quite some time by her mother, but grows into an obsession. Ji-won starts to notice peoples’ piercing blue eyes and wonder about how delicious they must taste. As her wonder starts to grow, she begins to have nightmares centered around eyes, wakes up into dreams, and wakes into reality in strange places leaving herself questioning what’s real and what isn’t.

This is such a good read. I can’t recommend it enough. I will say if you get squeamish it may not be for you. While not overly graphic, the occasional gory detail is very vivid and even made my stomach churn a little at one point, and I don’t lose my appetite or get queasy easily. I thought I knew where the story was headed when I approached the last chunk of the book but I’ll admit, while not ultimately too far off, I was pleasantly surprised to find it take a turn that I wasn’t expecting.

While there was the occasional minor spelling or grammatical error, and I think the book could have done wholly without the very final paragraph, it’s a solid 10 stars from me. The book comes out on June 25th, and it’s absolutely worth picking up.

This book is for the girlies who are in their female rage, f*ck the patriarchy (especially white men) era. I love a girl with a gross habit who finally decides to stop suppressing who she is and what she wants to do. I LOVED this and it will be an easy 5 star read and physical book purchase.

A deliciously weird and gross book, where a yearning to eat the eyeballs of prople with blue eyes is somehow not out of place alongside the important but much more mundane issues of grief, feminism, immigration and the fetishism of Asian women by some white men. A heady mix which somehow works well.
Can't wait to read more by this author.
Thank you to netgalley and Kensington Books for an advance copy of this book.

Final Rating: 4.5

Whatever you do, don't read this book while eating! In this book we meet Ji-won who is struggling after the separation of her parents. Her mother finds a new boyfriend who gives Ji-won and her sister the creeps, not to mention her dreams about wanting to eat the new boyfriends' eyeballs. We see Ji-won have to deal with racism and misogyny from those around her and watch her slowly spiral out of control. The horrors of racism and misogyny aren't the only kind of horror though, we also have some good old-fashioned cannibalism, tons of gore, and a serial killer. There were so many good for her revenge moments too, I found myself rooting for Ji-won the more she gave in to her impulses. And the ending will probably stay with me for quite a while! If you enjoyed Maeve Fly like I did, I think you'll definitely enjoy this one as well, and I'm really looking forward to reading more from this author in the future!

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC. I unfortunately DNF'd this book at 50%, the subject and writing was not for me.

I really enjoyed this! I was a bit disappointed it wasn’t more murdery, it takes a long time to even get to that, but even when it wasn’t it was still intriguing. It’s weird and a little unhinged and I like that.

I honestly enjoyed the book. It was a very easy read that kept me on edge and eager to get to each next chapter. It held my full interest until the end.
It left me curious on where and why my sympathy laid, but loved the feminist vibe and how the story went.

Women's rights! Women's wrongs!

There were a surprising number of twists and fakeouts for what felt like such a short fever dream of a book. Eyeballs are my ick but I made it through anyway.

How is this a debut?? It's so well-written!

Ji-won's world spirals into chaos following her father's affair and sudden departure. Her mother is hauntedly broken, her younger sister is left angered by the abandonment, and her future is slipping through her fingers. Ji-won's haunted by her odd and terrifying dreams of eyes and blood. The eyes are reminiscent of George's, her mother's white boyfriend. George is unsettling on multiple levels and treats Ji-won and her sister with contempt and judgment. Ji-won has a history of manipulating and deceiving those to make her feel betrayed or jealous.

This book is why you read books from authors with different backgrounds than your own. It opened my eyes to the lived experience of an Asian woman in America. The anger I felt reading this book. There is no likable male character, and the display of selfishness and misogyny is devastating. Her father is the person who sets off a chain of events that leads all the female characters to emotional and psychological distress. It also addressed the immense pressure young people are under to live up to their parents' dreams and the cost to their well-being. The idea of fate or predestination plays a prominent role throughout the book. The female characters demonstrate tenacity but frailty at the same time. I loved several of the characters and had nothing but heartbreak for others. The author's writing style is vivid and descriptive, particularly in the dream sequences.

The pace was slow to medium. The structure was good, but I did not care for the ending. It was too neat and predictable. Some readers might find the darkness and grotesque overwhelming. While the narrative is heavy and emotionally charged, it offers a thought-provoking look at social injustice.

In exchange for my honest review, I received an ARC copy of the ebook from Netgalley and Kensington Books. Thank you for the opportunity.

I deducted a star due to the fact that my eyes are blue and this book made me super nervous.

Nah, just kidding, what a debut! This is definitely a slow burn and can feel a bit repetitive at times. I didn’t find most of the characters particularly likable, but there’s definitely some satisfying scenes in this one. Ji-Won is nuts in a bizarrely addictive way.

Overall, I definitely recommend this one and feel this is an author to watch.

After reading this, I’m hungry. Very, very hungry.

We follow Ji-won as she’s going through a very difficult time. Her father has left, her mother is distraught, and at dinner there are piles of food around the table that go untouched until they are no longer hot. Amongst these dishes, there is a fish. The eyeballs are the best part, her mother says. They bring luck and good fortune to those with the stomach to devour them. So, Ji-won does.
From there, Ji-won spirals and psychosis takes place. Her mother becomes infatuated with a disgusting, Asian fetishizing man named George, a supposed friend at school who thinks of himself as a feminist becomes obsessed with her, she has lost almost everyone that she was close with. And if going through all of this isn’t enough, she sees blue eyes everywhere and must snuff the life out of them. They follow her, taunt her, and they probably taste divine.
A huge win for the horror genre, this female rage packed book is a gem. A good for her story that I will think about for a long time - and obviously never look at eyes the same way again. Raw hunger, anger, family turmoil, and misogyny… this was a treat. (Literally) Good for you, Ji-won!!!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher who provided me with an ebook copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All of these thoughts and opinions are my own.

Ji-won, the daughter of Korean immigrants, is struggling. Appa recently abandoned the family, her new life at college leaves her reeling, and to make matters worse, her mother‘s already found a new love: George, with his blue eyes and bulging wallet, is a self-righteous white guy with an Asian fetish, and he makes the family’s life a living hell. As Ji-won feels her hunger for these blue eyes rise, she cannot help herself but to give in.
This book was a quick-paced, at times entertaining read. In general, its message of defeating the patriarchy with its own weapons (in this case, violence) isn’t something that’s lost on me either. However, when taking a closer look at the text, I found the message’s delivery quite problematic: Ji-won’s killing spree seems to be justified by how she and her female family members are treated by the patriarchal society.
All of the novel’s male characters are obnoxious, the women’s roles in the whole mess are barely reflected, and, seeing that Ji-won’s first two victims are completely unrelated to her (one of them an unhoused man), I couldn’t help but think that the author rather wanted to rant about how it’s the fault of all men that the world is a shitty place, sprinkled with some nasty eye snacking, than to tell the story of a young woman’s awakening.
This made it not only impossible for me to sympathize with the main character, but also left me conflicted. Blaming society (or even destiny…) for one‘s wrongdoings is as phony as it gets, and surely doesn’t help the cause it’s pretending to fight for. Therefore, I’m actually not sure whether I’d recommend this book - maybe to the people who have always wondered what human eyes might taste like.
Thanks a lot to @netgalley and @erewhonbooks for providing me with an ARC in exchange for a honest review.

The Eyes Are The Best Part caught my attention with it's startling title and gore-geous cover. Female rage, decent into madness, stomach churning body gore, murder and revenge; what more could you want?

Unfortunately, this book did leave me wanting.

I think my biggest issue was that this story is not at all subtle. I knew immediately that this story was going to dive into Asian fetishization, and I was excited by this direction. However it felt like nearly every interaction Ji-won had with a man in this story was hitting this theme so thoroughly on the head that at times it made me want to roll my eyes. I would have appreciated if the male characters were a more realistic, and I think that if this were the case, the whole scenario would have been much more horrifying to me. But instead, they feel like caricatures.

You've got the absent father who never loved his daughters for simply not being sons- okay fine. Then there is George, Ji-won's mother's boyfriend, who is an absolute pig in all of the most obvious ways. It's clear from the beginning that he is only with Umma because he likes Asian women, but I feel like this point is just beaten to death. I'd have liked to see a bit more into him and Umma's relationship, to understand why she likes him and then have that desolve as he gets what he wants. But instead he's just so stereotypically disgusting from the get go. And there is Geoffrey- the 'fake feminist incel' who is so obviously evil from the start. The author could have tastefully peppered in that this character was making a show of being a feminist, but instead she has him literally wearing shirts with feminists quotes, carrying around feminist literature, and saying things like "I'm not like other guys" in every single scene that he's in.

Aside from the lack of subtlety, my biggest issue with this book is pacing. There are parts that are so miserably slow, and then parts that are so fast that the reader doesn't have any time to process. I felt like I was getting whiplash reading this book. And while I do like a good slow burn, this 'horror' novel took a very long time to actually get into it's horror aspect, and once it does get there it feels very rushed.

With my complaints aside, I want to acknowledge the things I did enjoy about this story. The gore was pretty great, and the author's descriptions of eating eyeballs is the stuff of nightmares. I really liked Ji-won's character. Her struggle to fit in felt very natural, and I felt like her decent into madness was done really well. It was uncomfortable and confusing in the best way.

The premise of this story was really good, and I can tell that it has good bones, I just felt like it needed some serious polishing to be great.

I received a gifted copy of this from Net Galley for an honest review.
I went into this book without knowing a lot about it. I did not get past 50% unfortunately. I just didn’t vibe with the characters and it was really slow for my liking. I also didn’t think this was super scary tbh.

Wow!! Disturbing!! Unsettling!! I think I enjoyed this story but I’m not 100% certain. I found parts to be so fascinating and disgusting but other parts I felt were lacking and at times boring. It felt like a very confusing roller-coaster that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be on which I feel as though was the intention of the author. If so that they nailed it.

This is an insanely good novel for a debut. I love the MC, she's like a perfect grey character. At times you'll be rooting for her while at others you'll feel conflicted.
The pacing was great to me. While Geoffrey sometimes didn't feel like a believable character I still think he was a great addition to the novel. I just wish he was fleshed out a little more or their relationship was explored even more because I did feel like the pendulum swung very hard all of a sudden.
Wonderful body horror that kept me questioning things at all times. Sometimes I thought I knew where the novel would be going but I was happily proven wrong!

As soon as I saw the cover for this book, I was sold. And the blurb pulled out the chair for me and pinned me down to read. What an incredible novel. I couldn’t put it down! And the ending, brilliant! A top read for 2024!

4.5/5

Ji-won’s life is tumbling into disarray. She discovered her Appa’s extramarital affair, and he soon after departed from their lives. Her mother, distraught, finds a new boyfriend, George, with succulent blue eyes that she can’t seem to get out of her mind. And she’s not doing as well in college as she hoped to. When she starts having horrifying yet enticing dreams full of eyes, Ji-won doesn’t care how many victims start to accumulate around her campus or how many people she needs to deceive- her hunger and rage with be sated in the end. “The Eyes Are the Best Part” is a feminist psychological horror about a female Korean-American serial killer.

“Men like George aren’t like us. Not like me, not like Ji-hyun. Not even my father, another man, can compare because George’s power doesn’t come from the fact that he has a penis. It comes from his whiteness. For us, that kind of certainty and self-assuredness is an impossibility. We girls are taught from an early age that we are demonstrably inferior to our male counterparts. We are smaller, weaker, stupider. When we succeed, it’s only because men allow us to.”

I support women’s rights, but more importantly, I support women’s wrongs. This book is about female rage, through a Korean-American lens. I sympathized with the narrator and felt her pain and rage, loving the ending - even if it felt a little like it tied up a bit too nicely. It was a great story about desire, obsession, and a woman slowly losing her sanity. I couldn’t go to bed without finishing the book once it started getting intense, so even though the beginning is a bit slower than you might expect, I would recommend readers persevere. For me, since I’m used to lit-fic, it wasn’t even that bad. Definitely give this a try if you want an interesting horror with a unique perspective.

“After all, why would be suspect docile, sweet, submissive Ji-won? What reason would I have for hurting him? Why would a woman, let alone an Asian woman, challenge his authority? George sees himself as an alpha male.”

Ji-Won has been having a rough time lately. She’s Korean American and dealing with both being in college and having typical dudes fetishizing that fact that she is Asian. On top of that, her dad has just up and left her mom, who spends the time afterwards moping, contemplating suicide, eating fish eyes every night for good luck, and dating a new white guy. The fish eyes started off okay – gross, as far as Ji-Won and her sister were concerned, but okay. When her mother starts dating George, though, with his piercing blue eyes, eyes become a bit of an obsession for Ji-Won. I was pitched this book as a female serial killer who eats her victims eyes. While that is what I got, it took a while to get there. Mostly, the story is about these two sisters dealing the death of their parents’ marriage, no longer seeing their father anymore, and living through the constant fetishization of asian women. What white guy wouldn’t want to date one of them, right? Everyone knows all asian women are docile and submissive, sweet and calm. That’s definitely what George thinks as he comes waltzing into their lives, ogling every young asian woman that passes him. George is gross. All of the men within this book are gross. This book has a lot of commentary on that, as well as having parents who moved to America and what that can look like for them and their children. There’s discussion on how race and gender can effect one’s standing in this system we have. The horror of the book is Ji-Won’s intense mental decline. It was weird and gross, but so well-written. It’s definitely unhinged woman on a path of revenge and is thoroughly enjoyable. A 3.5 star. I did like it and I do think it was well-done, there were just some moments that felt too slow for me and I think different marketing would have worked in this book’s benefit. It is not purely jumping into murder, there’s a slow build so that you can understand and sympathize with the character by the end of it.

I enjoyed this so much more than I expected to! I knew the cover and title instantly intrigued me but I wasn’t 100% sure if it would be for me, however I really enjoyed it!

The horror, violence and graphic descriptions really ramped up in the second half - I’ll never look at an eyeball the same!

The book had a couple of issues for me - I felt like some plot points were wrapped up far too quickly & also there were FAR too many dream sequences. I end up skimming these. I feel like there’s other & better ways to let us, the reader, know that a character is losing it.

Overall I really enjoyed it & will definitely read more from Monica Kim!