HUNGRY GHOST

Valerie Chu’s secret is eating her alive.

Val has been pressured to stay thin for as long as she can remember, her mother’s own disordered eating habits bleeding over and taking control of hers. Though her mom cooks delicious Chinese dishes, she’s always quick to remind Val to watch what she eats, often body-shaming Val’s curvy White best friend, Jordan. Her friends gently tease Val for being so tiny, but none of them know about her disordered eating or her bulimic compulsions. While she’s kept both hidden all these years, her struggles come to a head while on a class trip to Paris. Unable to keep to her purging schedule and enjoy the sights, Val begins to reevaluate the importance of being thin. Just as she’s settling into this new mindset, a family tragedy throws her whole life into upheaval. Ying’s artwork is appropriately nuanced and expressive, approaching the topics of grief, eating disorders, and mental health conditions sensitively and complemented by Wong’s subdued palette of mint green, soft peach, slate gray, and light brown. Classic bordered panels fill the front half of the book with a sense of strict control that begins to unravel later in the story. The impact of social media on teen girls’ body image is also addressed: Val scrolls through Instagram several times, making the correlation between her unhappiness and the platform’s impact clear.

A gorgeously wrought, therapeutic story filled with tenderness and honesty.