Review: How to Be Eaten

How to Be Eaten is one of those books that doesn’t fit into my typical reading genre. Retold fairytales are, in my opinion, rarely told well since they fail to define themselves. Somehow they just seem to come off as an extension or a well-written fanfiction of the original. They rely too heavily on the original piece for it to be considered its own independent work.

However, Maria Adelmann somehow embraces this reality and simply tells five very well-known stories with an entirely different lens. The setting for these stories is present-day New York City, where five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas.

Although their traumas and responses are different, they all struggle to label their experience and find validation in the real world. “Because when it’s your own story it’s harder to see it clearly,” says Raina, “it’s harder to know exactly what to do, and it’s harder to do it. It’s easier to see the big picture when you’re not involved.”

The only proper way to begin to understand what each of these women is experiencing is for each of them to tell their stories from beginning to end. This is where Adelmann shines. Although she does put a modern twist on five common fairytales, she allows the characters to tell their stories. Each is deliciously fragmented and biased based on who is speaking. They intentionally leave out certain portions of their stories or continually return to a recurring theme.

“You can’t change the past, but it’s infinitely reframeable. You can tell the same story over and over a hundred different ways, and every version is a little right and every version is a little wrong.”

Adelmann makes her characters painfully believable and human. She fills in our gaps in knowledge somehow by showing off these characters’ deepest insecurities. For example, as she writes in Gretel’s retelling:

“My memories come in flashes of feelings, not words: a hard ache in the stomach, the tickle of a fingernail rising up a neck, the hot acid scrape of sour candy on the tongue, of bile in the throat. Details strewn like crumbs down a dark alley, leading me nowhere.”

Someone with childhood trauma might not have the language or understanding to fully comprehended what happened to them, and Adelmann weaves this into Gretel’s story. Gretel, as an adult, now has the language to interpret her childhood but can’t fully come to terms with her childhood trauma. All her characters have depth and are equally likable and detestable for different reasons.

Perhaps what makes the story more realistic is that while it includes some tips and moral platitudes, the book is far from being didactic. As Adelmann writes in the book:

“As if life could be packaged up like this, contained, delivered in a few anecdotes, bright and glistening, easy to swallow: all insight, all joke, all moral. As if real life offered any consistent essential truths. As if it were possible for me to explain myself. As if I wasn’t always leaving out the most important parts.”

The book keeps you engaged from beginning to end with so many twists and turns throughout to keep you engrossed and sympathetic. Although you won’t leave with a perfect understanding of trauma or even what these women experienced, hopefully, you will leave with an understanding and a desire to learn more.