The Eyes Are The Best Part is a deep descent into a young Korean girls madness after her father leaves the family. Ji-Won feels nothing but anger towards her father and shame and embarassment towards her umma who can't seem to function without a man there to tell her how to survive in life. Not long after her Appa leaves Ji-Wons mother brings home George. An older white man who clearly has a thing for Asians and who Ji-Won and her sister right away get a queasy feeling about. Umma feels like she's hit the lottery, ever since her husband left when she cooks fish she pops the squishy eye in her mouh and bites down feeling it pop in her mouth. It is said that it brings good luck which she wants nothing more than her girls to also have. Finally after much pestering her girls Ji-Won finally gives in and pops an eyeball into her mth expecting to hate it but finding instead that she loves the feeling of the cartilage popping in her mouth and the feeling of the viscous fluid sliding over her teeth.

Luck however is not what eating that eyeball brings Ji-Won, instead it brings her a blindfully painful desire for eyes. Blue eyes imparticular, like the eyes of her Umma's new boyfriend George. Suddenly lust for the taste of eyes is all that Ji-Won can think of. This lust will take her to places that she never dreamed of going. Speakning of dreams she's not always sure when she is awake or dreaming which alone can get her into trouble.

I wanted so much to just adore this book but it feel a little flat for me. There wasn't a single character that I could find myself rooting for. They weren't terrible there just wasn't much reason for me to care for them. the descriptions of the eyeballs, how they tasted and felt made me a little queasy from time to time but it didn't really strike horror or anything like that to me. Its not a bbad book by any means its just not my kind of book.

I want to thank #Netgalley for the chance to read #TheEyesAreTheBestPart by #MonikaKim in return for a fair and honest review.

Unhinged woman, revenge plot, body horror, feminism, cultural dialogue….this book checked a lot of my boxes. I found myself engaged during the whole book and wanting to know what the MC would get up to next. My jaw dropped a couple times. Based on the ending I would be happy to see a sequel! Monika Kim has written a fantastic debut novel and I’ll eagerly read anything else she publishes.

A masterpiece of psychological horror. This book will haunt me. Monika Kim makes the seemingly mundane pressures of everyday life - divorce, college, parents finding new partners, loneliness - and makes you feel how brutally they can squeeze a person's life and mind. Ji-won's life is being turned upside down and inside out. Her family is unraveling because her dad has left. Her mother is falling apart. The pressures of college are crushing her. There's generational trauma from her immigrant parents, haunting memories of poverty and starvation, and there's the world itself, with all its racism and sexism intruding everywhere all the time. And inside all of this is Ji-won's own mind, cracking into sharper and sharper fragments. Ji-won doesn't just break, though. She is also changing herself, turning into something and someone new, in the process. Kim beautifully captures the deteriorating, transforming relationships between parent and child, between two sisters, between friends, and between Ji-won and the world. You can feel her life, her mind, getting squeezed tighter and tighter, and her final transformation is both terrifying and darkly exhilarating.

Thank you NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this book ahead of time in exchange for a review. You should read it!

Korean American college student Ji-won is still dealing with the aftermath of her father abruptly abandoning his family when her mom gets a new boyfriend. George is white, brash, and casually racist, but Ji-won's mom seems to love him, so what choice does Ji-won have but to go along with it? Meanwhile, Ji-won's struggling at college, as she's lonely and doesn't have the great grades she's used to from high school. As George's rudeness escalates, Ji-won's mental state deteriorates to the point that she becomes fixated on his bright blue eyes and all of the hatred they represent to her.

This is a really fantastic twist on psychological horror, seeing the villain's descent into madness from her own point of view. It's also a great example of social horror, seeing how all of the microaggressions affect Ji-won's mental state. As you could expect from the title and cover (which will likely be fueling my nightmares for months to come), there's a bit of cannibalism in this book, and while it's not something you want to read while eating, it wasn't nearly as stomach-churning as I feared it would be. I was pleasantly surprised by this one!

When college student Ji-Won's father leaves, it sends shockwaves through her and her family's life. As she navigates infuriating new relationships with white men, she starts having unsettling dreams and cravings for eyes that start bleeding into reality. It's hard to say what's more unsettling - the body horror, or the rage-inducing behavior of the entitled, fetishizing, and manipulative two white men in Ji-Won's life. The relationships between Ji-Won and her mother and sister were well realized, and the tension keeps ratcheting up throughout. The chapters are short and tense, making this a compelling read. There were times when the rage at whiteness and male entitlement became more soapbox statements than naturally interwoven into the story, and I wish the author had trusted the reader to make the connections and realizations for themself. Similarly, the men were so over the top villainous that it detracted from the message. It felt like a first novel - but one with enough going for it that I'm excited to see what the author does next!

Good book and I think the concept was great. It was strange and entertaining in all the right ways. I usually am not one for books like this but this book was really good and I liked it

When I saw this compared to 'My Sister, the Serial Killer' I knew it was an instant read for me, as that book is one of my absolute favorites and 'The Eyes Are the Best Part' absolutely lives up to that strong comparison. As soon as I started reading it, I was absolutely hooked and it did not let up. The writing is perfection, and what a wonderful debut novel. One of the best entries into the 'female rage' genre. Highly recommended.

Ji-won’s Dad suddenly moves out leaving a trail of emotional havoc on their family and her Mom goes into severe depression. Ji-won and her sister try to be patient and understanding with their Mom even when she suddenly has a boyfriend, George, only months after her Dad moves out. Ji-won can’t sleep, her grades are suffering and she becomes obsessed with the eyes of the fish they eat seeing them in her nightmares and hallucinations from the stress and abandonment of her father and George moving in. As she is headed for a nervous breakdown a series of murders occur near her college campus where the eyes have been removed. This is a psychological suspense that will leave you shaking your head as you try to decipher and understand Ji-won!

Thank you to Kensington Books and NetGalley for the ARC!
#NetGalley #TheEyesAretheBestPart

this book is weird and disturbing, obviously I love it!
Absolutely recommended, I can't wait to buy the paperback

Love the female rage, couldn't bring myself to feel bad for any of the victims, they deserved it. So hard to put down.

A commendable addition to the burgeoning "women who kill" subgenre. We need more books about female serial killers!! 👁

Ji-won is a college student whose family begins to collapse after her father leaves and her mother begins dating a really creepy white man. Spiraling out of control, she finds herself increasing obsessed with eyes and the desire to eat them whole. What began as an attempt to cheer up her mother—eating a fish eye—quickly escalates to violence in a desperate bid for control. What better way to gain power over male objectification than by consuming the vessel used to oggle and ostracize?

The very short chapters are an attempt at invoking frentic tension and a sense of mental instability. It works better in some portions of the story than in others. There are some clunky moments that fast-forward in time and seem more like the author planned on adding to that section but forgot before submitting a final draft. Other people may not be put off by this, but it annoyed me enough to drop my rating. Again this choice was clearly intentional, it's just a writing technique I personally dislike.

This novel weaves together the gratuitous gore and violence one expects from a serial killer/slasher story descending into madness and obsession with racism and sexism. The fetishization of Asian women is viewed just as, if not more, horrifically than the protagonist's bouts of violence. Full of both micro-agressions and explicit bigotry, those sensitive to such topics should tread lightly.

If you enjoyed "Maeve Fly" but wished that book had less 'sad girl' vibes and more social commentary, this is the book for you!!

To me, this book had a YA vibe, and I would recommend it to adult fans of YA. This book is definitely brutal, which I would expect from an adult book, but the writing style reminds me a lot YA. I also feel like the relationships between characters are less nuanced than what I would expect from an adult novel.

I really liked the idea of this book, but I feel as though it might have worked better as a novella rather than a full length novel. Some of the dream sequences became repetitive, and I didn't feel as though all of the threads of the story had a satisfactory conclusion.

Additionally, I wish that there was a little bit less hand holding with the themes of the book. Every "bad" character is only ever saying the MOST stereotypical racist things possible in a way that comes across cartoony. Real racism is often much more subtle, and I think the characters, George and Geoffrey especially, could have done with more nuance.

A refreshing horror novel, full of nuance, food for thought, and female rage. In less than 300 pages, Monika Kim paints an extremely detail picture on the close correlartion between sexism and racism, which is still a topic that many people still don’t take into account nowadays. I would very much recommend it.

Thank you to NetGalley, Erewhon Books, and Monika Kim for the opportunity to read an arc for The Eyes Are the Best Part.

This novel follows Ji-won, a Korean-American woman, during a time in her life where so much is falling apart around her. Everything feels unstable after her father leaves, and they take a turn for the worst when her mother meets a man named George. He is not only a misogynist, but he fetishizes Asian women and treats them like objects, especially Ji-won’s mother. We watch as Ji-won starts to lose her mind and is fantasizing not only about killing George, but eating his eyeballs - and begins finding other men to enact these fantasies on in the mean time.

This novel was phenomenal. I love reading horror books about unhinged women, and would put this in the “good for her” category. The commentary on racism, specifically against Asian women, is done masterfully through witnessing Ji-won and her sister and mother’s journeys. Ji-won starts as a passive and introspective MC, spending more time in her inner world than participating in reality. She’s an observer more than anything, often avoiding conflict as a means of self-preservation and peacekeeping. This passiveness in her own life mirrors her observation of her mother constantly “waiting,” an excellent representation of generational characteristics and trauma that play out in new ways. However, we start to see her passiveness is a mask for her influence on others. She silently affects their lives and relationships, planting ideas and quietly watching her actions take effect. She sticks to the shadows to play out her fantasies of eating someone’s eyeballs, and becomes more bold as the story reads on.

The imagery of Ji-won eating the eyeball is brilliantly written. Not only is the actual horror of it well-portrayed, but I loved the idea of our quiet MC doing something bold and new, despite how horrifying it is in nature, and the dead eyes “watching” her. She’s finally “seen” by something without the repercussions of someone alive seeing what she has done. The eyeballs, though inanimate, have their own personification to them as Ji-won’s personal audience to her darkest urges.

Eating the eyeball represents losing control - both in a positive and negative way. Ji-won discusses feeling homesick for a time in her life when things made sense. She’s getting older and facing the hardships of school, her father leaving, carrying her mother’s depression and her sister’s needs, and her mother’s horrible new partner. Eating an eyeball for Ji-won is both the loss of control in her life, as well as her letting go and giving into to a wilder, darker part of herself.

I also loved the duality of the characters George and Geoffrey throughout the novel. George and Geoffrey represent two sides of the same coin: racism that exists on both ends of the political spectrum. George, an extremely conservative man, shows the more severe, outward forms of racism such as fetishizing Asian women, using slurs, etc. And Geoffrey, a performative extreme liberal who ultimately ends up man-splaining concepts of oppression to the oppressed, and commits micro aggressions under the guise of solidarity.

I had so many thoughts after devouring (pun intended) this story and I know this is one that will stick with me for a very long time. I cannot wait to read more stories from Kim and would highly recommend this to fans of feminist horror, or horror books overall.

Oh my god!! I can not believe this was a debut novel! This is going to be extremely hard to beat for a place in my top 3 books of 2024! My (blue) eyes were glued to every word and I could not read fast enough! I will be reading any book this author ever puts out! 5/5 stars!

Nothing like a good story of female rage.

I read this book without reading the summary so I didn’t know what to expect. At first, I thought it would be a family drama about learning to live with a broken home. In a way, it was like that, but a much more psychologically complex version.

The story starts with a mother and her two daughters coping the best they can after the head of the household decides to leave. Ji-Won, the older of two sisters, is left to pick up the pieces and coddle her inconsolable mother. The downward spiral of her mental health starts slow and rapidly picks up. What begins as a series of dreams takes a turn for the worst when her mother meets a new man. A man who has anything but good intentions for the family.

When her dreams turn bloody, there’s no going back. Especially when she can no longer distinguish her dreams from her reality.

This was a fantastic body horror, especially with the <spoiler alert> eye eating. My only problem with this book was how suddenly the story came to an end. I’m hoping this means there’s a part two in the works because I’d love to see where Ji-Won takes the story next.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

I had a hard time getting into this one at first but I’m so glad I stuck with it. This book is brilliant.

The Eyes are the Best Part is a horror story that gets weirder and wilder as you keep reading. We follow Ji-won, a college freshman whose mother has a new boyfriend. This man is trash- racist, perverted, disrespectful, etc. Jo-won makes it her mission to get rid of him while she slowly spirals out of control.

Not for the faint of heart, this gruesome story is a winner for any horror fan.

This was a book that I just could not put down. <spoiler>I am not sure how the author made me feel sympathetic towards Ji-won. I can't say that the random people she killed deserved it. But George definitely did.</spoiler> We watch the descent of Ji-won as her mental health spirals out of control, after her father leaves and her mother starts dating a new man. Along with that we see the familial drama between mother and two daughters, who seemed close but all become at ends with each other. We also see asian fetishism which is not a topic that is broached nearly enough despite being very prevalent.
This one can get a bit graphic with the body horror aka<spoiler>tearing out and eating of human eyes.</spoiler> The writing is also a bit choppy, which I feel like worked well for the story. But this writing style may not be everyone's preference.
Such a strong debut and I can't wait to see what else this author does!

I am blown away by how much I loved this book. I mean I seriously seriously LOVED IT!!! If you’re a fan of horror I think you should give this one a go. It was perfection.

Thank you to NetGalley and Erewhon Books for this ARC! This book will be out in June!