Imagine "Little Shop of Horrors" as a psychosexual thriller (minus the musical numbers) and you come close to understanding the overall plot of this book. This plant, though no Audrey, is full of quiet menace.

as a longtime lover of little shop of horrors, i had to try this one out, and i’m glad i did! i’d heard great things ‘about sarah maria griffin’s writing, and her prose was definitely my favorite element. the perspective of the plant was such an interesting take, and the weird body horror was just creepy enough without being too much for my tastes. i only wish this book was gayer, but it was plenty weird with a strange ending like i was hoping for.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5

I’ll preface by saying - this book was good, it just wasn’t what I was expecting.
While marketed as a fantasy/horror novel, it’s not the mystical gore fest that a sentient flesh eating plant may be able to bring to the table.
Our MC, down on her luck Shelly, is hired at a flower shop in a failing mall - the perfect creepy atmosphere for a horror novel. We have an incredibly similar sounding mall in the city where I live and the vibes were honestly spot on.
She starts getting a bit deep with the store owner Neve, who’s in a bit deep with that flesh eating plant I mentioned. This book has a bit of love, some scares, nostalgic feels, hope and desire, it really has a lot to offer. Entered with an open mind, this book can really shine!
Thank you NetGalley and Tor books for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Shell’s engagement crumbled and along with it went her career and her social circle, leaving her trapped back in her family home with no prospects and little desire to try to patch her life back together. It probably wouldn’t work anyway. But Shell isn’t the only thing in Woodbine feeling broken. There’s the Woodbine Crown, the decaying shopping mall that’s still the lifeblood of the suburban community. There’s Neve, the fascinating woman running the overgrown flower shop who offers Shell a job and maybe a chance at something more.

And within a dirty glass enclosure in the center of the mall, there’s a plant. His name is Baby and he can fix you. He can fix everything. Shell just needs to let him in.

This is a deeply sad book. I almost DNF’ed not because it was in any way bad, but just because it was such a bummer. Griffin writes the mundane crumbling of a largely superficial life with achingly realistic clarity and it was so sad in a manner I wasn’t expecting from the carnivorous plant book. While the plant is largely our narrator, there’s a lot more of the horror of realizing you’ve hit thirty and hate all your friends and don’t care about any of the things you’ve thought you needed to care about than the horror of the eldritch abomination plant. That’s there too, but melancholy dominates this story rather than terror.

It’s about codependency, I think, and controlling relationships. I’ve seen some people mad that Baby is a man but I think Baby has to be a man for the story Griffin is telling with Shell. It’s the same reason Shell does one of the things that drives me most nuts- she’s far more interested in the woman she likes but decides to sleep with the man instead because it’s easier. It felt realistic to her character but it also reflects some real life situations I’ve been in that hurt so badly, so again, it wasn’t fun.

I think it’s a good book, because it did make me feel things and think about relationships and decay in a compelling way, but it was also so much not what I expected that it’s hard not to hold that against it. I expected to be scared, not sad. I expected more sapphic romance, albeit a toxic one, and while there is a sapphic pining underpinning, it’s far more about broken relationships than the forging of a new one. These things aren’t the books fault, but I wonder if it was marketed incorrectly. I’m not sure, because I think it would be hard to market anyhow.

Books don’t have to be fun, especially horror stories, but my issue is that the other threads- the horror, the romance, the almost thriller-esque plot line with Jen-weren’t always woven into the sadness in a way that made me want to keep reading. I’m not mad I finished the book- it’s well written and thoughtful- but I do think I would have DNFed if I didn’t have a review copy.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

DNF @ 10%

unfortunately, I just cant continue to read. the writing should not be this repetitive and boring this early in a book. I also really don't like the abrupt flipping of POV making things confusing. There is also no chapter markers, trying to read this on kindle is very annoying.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Tor Publishing Group | Tor Books, as always, opinions are my own.

Reeling from both breaking up with her fiancee and losing her job, Shell Pine moves home and starts to rebuild her life. Walking through the local mall one day, Shell sees a small sign on a florist shop – Help Needed. Even though the mall is losing tenants and is on its way to being condemned, the flower shop owner (Neve) is doing well enough to hire Shell. Neve has a secret, however, and it is deadly.

This did not go the way I thought it would. Lushly written and imagined, this is almost body horror cozy? The POV shifts were a bit confusing at first, but you get used to it quickly.

Recommended, although you might look askance at your flowers for a couple of days.

I received an ARC copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Weird…but was it weird enough?

Eat the Ones You Love follows Michelle, who has just become single and lost her job which has led to her moving back in with her parents. While walking around the mall one day, she sees that her local flower shop is hiring. Michelle sees this as a new and exciting opportunity that may change the course of how her life has been going. Neve, the florist is happy to bring Michelle on. But not everything is what it seems in this mall. Neve has grown an orchid in the mall. This orchid, named Baby, has a taste for human flesh, is obsessed with Neve, and he might just have plans for Michelle as well.

I love “weird” books so this sounded right up my alley. It is weird, I’ll give it that, but I don’t think the weird to contemporary fiction ratio worked that well here. This sentient plant is its own character throughout the novel. His voice weaves into Michelle’s point of view in an eerie way. When this orchid is not on page though, this story is really just a book about Michelle, her imploding life, her crush on Neve, and her finding her place within Neve’s friend group. Another point of view we follow is Neve’s ex-girlfriend, which gives more backstory to Neve and her orchid.

If you enjoy messy stories about a group of people, you may find this enjoyable. If you are intrigued by a people-eating plant who is obsessed with a florist, you may also find something enjoyable here. It didn’t quite work for me, but the characters are well written and I found the writing enjoyable. I would definitely try something else by Sarah Maria Griffin, but I wasn’t wowed by this story.

DNF at 30%

I am STRUGGLING to get through this and am giving up at a third of the way through. The writing has a dark humor to it and there is obvious hints at a plot, but I need something to HAPPEN. I'm bored and not invested in the characters at all. There is almost no tension or intrigue. I wanted to like this so badly, but not badly enough to stick with a book that is boring me so badly.

Eat the Ones You Love is a visceral, enchanting novel that combines the bizarre and twisted with the realities of the human experience. It has lush and inventive writing as well as witty yet tragic characters. A suburban gothic that will leave you hungry for more!

this was an interesting read! i was really into it for the majority of the book, but the ending left me a little bit wanting, and i'm having a hard time putting my finger on why.

it starts out as the kind of psychological horror that i really enjoy—one where you know from the beginning who the threat is, and you get to see the characters discover and struggle against that threat from the "murderer" POV. except in this case, the threat/murderer/narrator is a sentient plant that has taken over a mostly-empty suburban mall in Dublin, which is delightful. mundane, extremely relatable to me as an aging millennial, and deliciously creepy. we discover this through Shell, who has moved back in with her parents after a breakup and is desperately looking for a new direction when she sees a "help needed" sign in a flower shop window. we begin to learn more through Neve, said florist, who has an immediate flirty chemistry with Shell—but is also deeply in the thrall of a hungry person-eating orchid. slowly we get to know a wider cast of mall workers, past friends, and ex-lovers who are all tangled together in the way only small towns and queer communities can achieve, and all the while there's a dread-filled sense that the creeping vines of the plant at the center of it all are slowly tightening.

all of this is fantastic, imo! atmospheric, funny, real-feeling, pleasantly horrifying. but for some reason the ending, which i won't spoil, didn't quite thrill me the way i wanted it to. maybe partly a product of me reading distractedly, while on vacation with several small children. maybe partly personal taste, and maybe partly something in the writing that didn't compel me at the very end. i was prepared for either side of this plant-vs-humans conflict to win out, but felt instead like nobody really won or lost, and all my emotions about the characters and the tension had nowhere to go.

that said, i really enjoyed it overall, and the ending might hit someone else more powerfully than it did me! it's an exciting and weird book, with a very fun premise.

"You have to learn to love somebody in the quiet of themselves, as well as the noise, the chatter."

"Half of us felt patient with her. The other half thought we should kill her."

I'm really struggling with my rating on this one. Maybe 3.5? It almost felt like a fever dream! There were twists that I did not see coming, and gasp-worthy moments that I was squealing about to a friend.

I enjoyed the characters, watching Shell grow and dissociate from her previous life, and rediscovering herself was very gratifying. There were little nuggets that were so relatable, and wise words were sprinkled throughout. The found family within the fellow mall workers was so sweet. I was hoping for more in the sapphic rep, there was a lot of longing but very little action between the women; we had more with the man.

The plant itself was the unique villain I didn't know I wanted. There were tiny bits of the "horroriffic" past that would have been way more impactful to live through. I did enjoy the unique way the plant crept into their lives (and more). Ultimately, though, I wanted more. More real-time plant attacks and creepiness, please.

Thank you, NetGalley, for the eARC.

DNF.

The thing is that this is mind-numbing.

Baby, the monster plant that occasionally eats humans and hungers after Neve (the woman tending him) specifically, narrates the book – and the moments where he’s talking in first-person are deliciously creepy!

But the vast majority of the book is him telling us what’s happening in the heads of the humans, functionally third-person, and these people are SO GODS-DAMN BORING. Endlessly mundane, endlessly banal, endlessly dull. I could not give less of a fuck about Shell’s instagram, or all her petty anxieties, or the will-they-won’t-they energy suffusing their friend group! I am not here for all the reflections on how people have, or haven’t, changed since secondary school! When we straight-up had orchids growing out of someone’s face and QUESTIONS WERE NOT ASKED OR ANSWERED, I gave the fuck up. (Past the 50% mark, for the record. I almost DNFed so many times, but then we’d have a split second of really gorgeous creepiness and I’d push on…until I couldn’t take one more minute of it.) The ‘explanation’ Neve gives at that point is so vague no functioning human on the face of planet Earth would accept it, sorry – you’d RUN to the emergency room, you certainly wouldn’t keep hanging around the flower shop that presumably infected you!

And please don’t get me started on the baffling emails from Neve’s ex. I have no idea why they’re included, because they add absolutely nothing. Just pages and pages of her begging a friend to take her seriously but dancing around what exactly is going on, with even MORE pages of how much her life sucks and oh isn’t her inability to strike up a conversation with her coworkers so very WOEFUL. No, woman, it’s pathetic; if you want them to talk to, start talking!!! She doesn’t even have anxiety, she’s just deeply, deeply lame.

Baby is the only character that’s at all interesting, and for some reason the author decided not to focus on him? Inexplicable. Though the way his own opinions suddenly interject into the ‘third-person’ – abruptly reminding you of who’s doing the narrating – had the potential to be very cool, but like. Those moments – along with the ones of Baby being Deeply Creepy about eating people – are just…specks of glitter lost in the grey mud that is the rest of it. Those specks certainly aren’t enough to save this novel.

This book is grey, and I’m so confused by all the positive reviews – they seem like they’re talking about some other book, not the one I read. I needed so much more creepy. I needed the spotlight to be on the man-eating plant! Not the wishy-washy literary-fiction-y mundanity that I read SFF/H to get AWAY from!

This had so much potential – and Griffin is clearly capable of writing marvellous creepiness! So I don’t understand what went wrong here. I want to shake whoever completely failed to edit this; how did the agent or editor NOT address how drowned-out the horror was by the lit-fic nonsense???

Sigh.

I’m cautiously willing to try Griffin again, depending on what a sophomore novel’s about. She can obviously write! But I need my spec fic to be so much more speculative than this, sorry-not-sorry.

This book was criminally good. So bizarre- anything plant and fungal is my current fixation. Griffin is a mastermind. Delivered this tale in such an efficient way.

OMG. This book was so weird and so good and I loved it. I’m not even sure how to adequately describe it…

So, most of the book is narrated in 3rd omniscient voice, which is that of a sentient plant. It’s such a bizarre premise, but it completely worked.

It definitely has shades of Little Shop of Horrors, but also, what it’s like working under late stage capitalism, how friendships change as we change, and maybe, when you really love someone, you just need to consume them.

This was such a bizarre and wonderful story, I highly recommend it if you’re looking for something different.

I absolutely loved this twisted, Little Shop of Horrors-inspired gem. As manipulative as he (or it?) may be, I couldn’t help but adore Baby. There’s something so hilariously delightful about an evil, egotistical orchid who’s completely full of himself—it had me chuckling more than once. Creepy, clever, and completely captivating!

🌿EAT THE ONES YOU LOVE🌿 by Sarah Maria Griffin was an unexpected story that was both intriguing and a bit slow to come to fruition. Thank you to the author, @netgalley and the publishers @torbooks and @macmillanaudio for the e and audio-ARCs. #macaudio2025

🌱🌱🌱

When Chelle is out looking for a new job and stumbles upon a curious flower shop with a help wanted sign, she is inextricably drawn into the store. The shop owner Nev is charming and Chelle is immediately smitten, accepting the job offer on the spot. As Chelle works beside Nev and obsesses about her, they form an intimate relationship, but lurking in the shadows is a dark and disturbing secret that Nev keeps even closer to her heart.

While I was definitely interested in the dark secret of Nev and was enthralled by the omniscent narration of the dark entity, I lost the plot on this one a bit when new characters veer the story in a very different direction. This was clearly an attempt to explain some of the secrets of Nev outside of the knowledge of Chelle but it just didn't work very well for me as the voice of that character was wildly different than the others and I kept getting kicked out of the story so to speak. The obsession and dangerous longings of the main characters were enticing but I just kept getting lost with the side story. Overall I found this story entertaining and somewhat unique but just couldn't keep my head in the game the whole time. I am glad I read to the end but also could have done without that side part.

But seriously, I LOVE the title and cover of this book!

I did really enjoy it, though I felt it was a little slow to get going. The body horror with the plant elements really got to me and made me itch and feel pretty grossed out (more so than gory body horror would-no idea why).

Shell’s life has just fallen apart when she sees a “ help wanted “ sign at the local florist. She is immediately attracted to Neve the florist but Neve has given her heart to a giant carnivorous plant which she keeps in the back…. Except he’s been sending out tendrils all over the building so who is really keeping who?
Fun, creepy read- thanks Netgalley for the ARC. My opinion is my own.

Accompanying this with the audiobook really helped. the format was just a bit difficult to follow each tone. The narrators helped massively with that issue. Not your typical horror, it leans more towards just weird lit. I loved Baby so much, their obsession was captivating.

This was very different and I really enjoyed this title. I liked the different POVs and how the story always felt like it was going somewhere. Sometimes ambitious stories get too heavy and lose the plot. Not this one. Congratulations to the author. Thank you for a copy to read and review. Will be recommending.