The Eyes Are the Best Part gave me exactly the kind of female-rage horror I want: a deeply angry woman, increasingly questionable decisions, disgusting imagery, and enough social commentary underneath the violence to make all of that rage actually mean something. I fucking loved this.

Ji-won’s life is already falling apart before she starts fantasizing about eating eyeballs. Her father has left the family after having an affair, her mother is devastated, her younger sister is struggling, and Ji-won’s first year of college is going terribly.

Then her mother starts dating George.

George is the absolute worst.

He’s condescending, fetishizes Asian women, acts like knowing a few things about Korean culture somehow gives him special access to Ji-won’s family, and immediately makes their already claustrophobic home feel even smaller.

But George does have one thing Ji-won likes.

His very blue eyes.

I loved watching Ji-won’s fixation slowly develop because the book doesn’t immediately throw her into full serial-killer mode. It simmers. Her dreams get stranger. Her anger grows. The eyes become more important. And eventually the line between imagining something horrible and actually wanting to do it starts disappearing.

The eye horror is also DISGUSTING.

I knew what this book was about before I started it. The fucking title tells you what’s coming. Somehow that did absolutely nothing to prepare me for how uncomfortable some of these scenes would make me. Monika Kim really makes you think about the texture of an eyeball significantly more than any human being should ever have to.

But the gore isn’t what made this five stars for me.

Ji-won’s hunger becomes tangled up with everything she’s experiencing: racism, misogyny, fetishization, abandonment, cultural expectations, and the pressure she feels to hold her family together after her father destroys it. Her rage isn’t presented as this neat, empowering thing either. She’s angry for completely understandable reasons, but what she does with that anger becomes increasingly horrifying.

And I LOVE that the book lets her be complicated.

Ji-won can be sympathetic and selfish. Protective and manipulative. Hurt and absolutely fucking terrifying. I understood her anger without needing the story to convince me that everything she did because of it was justified.

There’s also something incredibly satisfying about watching people continually underestimate her.

Ji-won knows exactly how people perceive her, especially the men around her, and eventually she learns how useful that can be. The quiet Korean American college girl nobody is paying much attention to becomes the person everyone probably should have been watching.

And by the time this fully descends into chaos, I was completely locked in.