What’s the book? The Eyes are the Best Part by Monika Kim
How dark is it? Not as dark as the eyeball theme promised
How good is it? 3/10 tasty tasty eyeballs
The beginning of this was promising. Ji-won’s dad runs off with another woman and her mom is paralyzed by it. Ji-won’s sister isn’t doing much better. Ji-won herself is starting college but instead of going to her dream school with all her friends, she’s stuck all by herself at the local college here in town. Things only go downhill from there as her mom starts dating George, who’s clearly a creep with a fetish for Asian ladies, and Ji-won herself develops a worrisome obsession with eyeballs. Specifically, she wants to eat eyeballs. Blue eyeballs. George’s blue eyeballs.
That’s creepy and interesting. We also find out early on that maybe Ji-won’s always been a bit unbalanced. Back when all her friends got into Berkeley and Ji-won didn’t, she went to great lengths to break up the friend group just because she was bitter and envious. When we learn that, Ji-won’s growing obsession and her quest to destroy George make a twisted sort of sense and Ji-won herself becomes intriguing.
Unfortunately, none of that promise pans out. The intriguing set-up quickly devolves into a weird revenge fantasy involving George and Ji-won’s new college friend Geoffrey, neither of whom have any redeeming qualities whatsoever. George is a cartoonishly gross fetishist with several Asian girlfriends who each think they’re the only one. He takes an actual “business trip” to Thailand that we all know is code for sex tourism. Geoffrey is an overblown parody of a ‘Nice Guy’ who wears feminist t-shirts and spouts feminist quotes while literally stalking Ji-won in a cartoonishly gross way. Yet, in spite of how clearly gross these guys are, they don’t actually do a lot. ‘Ji-won vs the Cardboard Cut-outs’ gets boring pretty fast; it’s hard to excited about her bringing down such useless villains. Of course, if I had gotten invested I would have been even more disappointed at the ending. Ji-won’s revenge ratchets up and up only to largely fizzle out in a fairly unsatisfying way.
The back of this book has a short interview with Monika Kim that says she wants to turn stereotypes about Asian women being passive sex objects on their heads. I get how this book is meant to do that but I’m not sure it actually does much toward that project. Ji-won’s mom and sister are utterly passive, with almost no personality beyond anxiety and spinelessness. Even at the end, when George is in the hospital after literally trying to kill Ji-won, her mom is sneaking off to see him, still hoping this creep will rescue her from her empty life. My best guess is that her utter infuriating helplessness is supposed to highlight Ji-won’s rage-fueled cleverness by contrast but it seems ham-handed and has a “Ji-won’s not like other Asian girls” feel that doesn’t sit well.
There could have been shades of ‘American Psycho’ here, where Ji-won gets away with multiple murders because no one believes a cute little Asian girl would do such grisly things. If that angle had been played up things might have got intriguing again, but that’s not really where Kim takes it.
This was a quick read and the eyeball obsession was kind of interesting but by the end I was mostly just bored and annoyed. There was a lot of wasted potential here. The cover is cool, though, and the page edges have creepy eyeballs on them. So that’s something.
