Books book reviews This Vicious Hunger by Francesca May Seeks to Sate with Style For readers looking to get lost in a conjuration of confusion, sapphic lust, and toxicity, this atmospheric tale will be an excellent fit. By Maura Krause | Published on October 28, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share “Some stories teach you to be brave, some teach you to be strong, and some make you laugh. Does laughter come cheaper than bravery or strength? Do you need all of these stories at once?” With these questions in the mouth of a character, author Francesca May offers a glimpse into how we might read This Vicious Hunger. This particular character, Olea, has been isolated for her entire life in a single place; life lessons and wider messages might actually be less valuable to her than laughter. Moreover, Olea’s home is decorated with brightly colored tapestries capturing the single most dramatic moment in the mythic stories she’s read. For her, the focal points of story are tone and image. So, perhaps it is not a coincidence that these elements are the great strengths of May’s new novel. The plot is elegant and simple: Upon the death of her not-so-dear husband, undertaker’s daughter Thora gets the chance she’s always wanted to study at St. Elianto’s university. These halls of academia are populated entirely by men—except that Thora has been offered a place by a brilliant botanist who turns out to be a woman. Dr. Florencia Petaccia is ready to consider Thora her partner in research, and the young lady begins to attend lectures and read about science late into the night. She even finds a friend in a kind and patient fellow scholar, Leonardo. Yet beneath Thora’s window, there lies a magnificent and mysterious garden. When Thora meets the garden’s strange caretaker, Olea, she ends up snared in an addiction that changes her priorities as well as her place at the university. Whether that addiction is to the beautiful and seemingly-naive Olea, or to the poisonous plants just beyond the garden gate, Thora cannot tell. From here the story becomes a spiral, contracting ever closer to the tower in the center of the garden. The novel’s progression reflects Thora’s entrapment in the same cycle: visit the garden and ask Olea for answers; rebuff (with increasing cruelty) Leonardo’s attempts to check on her; fight through her growing physical weakness and ravenousness to complete work for Petaccia… and ultimately return to the garden. Though bits of intriguing information surface with every sequence (for example, Olea is revealed as Dr. Petaccia’s ward), a reader looking for action or momentum will find this structure repetitive.  Buy the Book This Vicious Hunger Francesca May Buy Book This Vicious Hunger Francesca May Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The characters’ motivations also seem to lurch in circles. Some of these tangles feel real and recognizable: Thora vacillates between resolving never to think again about her attraction to women and seeking out lesbian erotic fiction, and her reasons for visiting the garden every night flip between lust for Olea and her desire for the valuable botanical knowledge the plants might contain. At other times, Thora jumps from attacking Leonardo to being grateful for him, from valuing her life at the university to feeling trapped, from spitting awful words at Olea to begging for forgiveness. This does feel like an accurate representation of addiction in its loss of reality and profound mood swings, but it feels sluggish to read. Contributing to this sense of heaviness is the reality that Thora has had no agency throughout this book: Her father controls her, then her husband, then her mother-in-law, who sends her to work under the exacting Dr. Petaccia. At the moment where Thora might gain ownership over her own life, she falls under the sway of Olea and her garden. Late in the novel, Thora makes one impetuous, confusing, and possibly damning choice at last, but at that point such an action feels out of character. Yet as Olea points out, not every story needs bravery or strength or Strong Character Arcs. There is so much heart in May’s depiction of Thora’s descent into obsession that the disorienting quality of the narrative becomes an entire experience of its own. May writes in the afterword that she worked on this novel while managing Long COVID, which clearly went into the visceral way she evokes Thora’s disintegrating health. Reading this tale, one might actually feel like Thora: dizzy, wrapped in brain fog, feverishly lustful, and compulsively returning to the mysteries at the core of this Gothic world.  Moreover, May’s gorgeous writing makes it very easy for her readers to imagine said world. From architecture to food to plants, lush yet crisp imagery populates the novel’s tonal cloud of near-madness. The difference between the hot, dry campus and the cool, fragrantly damp garden is almost tangible. When Thora struggles with the heat and moisture maintained in Petaccia’s lab, the same oppressiveness bleeds through the text. As Thora develops a hunger she cannot sate, food is depicted with the glowing deliciousness of a glossy magazine spread. And all the plants, from those that exist in our world to the utterly fictional, feel alive, immediate, and a little bit threatening. By the sequel-implying end, the profoundly toxic Machineel tree and its many poisonous siblings are characters as much as Olea and Thora are. For someone looking to get lost in a conjuration of confusion, sapphic lust, and toxicity, This Vicious Hunger will be an excellent fit. As we enter spooky season, atmospheric tales call to many a reader—and Francesca May has added to that haunted collection just in time.[end-mark] This Vicious Hunger is published by Redhook. The post <i>This Vicious Hunger</i> by Francesca May Seeks to Sate with Style appeared first on Reactor.