This Vicious Hunger

• Author: Francesca May
• Genre: Fantasy 
• Publication Date: August 26, 2023
• Publisher: Redhook

Thank you to Redhook, Orbit, Oliver Wehner, and Oriel Voegele for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

From the author of Wild and Wicked Things comes a dark gothic fantasy about intoxication, obsession, and a desperate hunger for knowledge, whatever the cost.

Thora Grieve finds herself destitute and an outcast after the sudden death of her husband, but a glimmer of hope arrives when a family friend offers her the chance to study botany under a famed professor. Once at the university, Thora becomes entranced by a mysterious young woman, Olea, who emerges each night to tend to the plants in the private garden below Thora’s window.

Hungry for connection, Thora befriends Olea through the garden gate, and their relationship quickly and intensely blossoms. Thora throws herself into finding a cure for the ailment confining Olea to the garden and sinks deeper into a world of beauty, poison, and obsession. Thora’s finally found the freedom to pursue her darkest desires, but will it be worth the price?

I really enjoyed the author’s first novel, and I was really looking forward to reading this one. In fact, I was completely prepared to love it. It’s got a lot of the elements that I enjoy reading about—dark academia, gothic setting, botany, and sapphic romance. However, it quickly became apparent that as much as I loved her first book, this wasn’t going to be a similar reading experience.

There are some great things about this book. May has a gorgeous, lush, and descriptive way with words, and this book is no exception. She creates a vibrant world full of dangerous plants, toxicity, and the endless quest for knowledge. Her writing is flowery (no pun intended) without overdoing it, and this is honestly what kept me reading. I also really liked the idea of vampirism that is portrayed in this story, and I would have really liked to see more of that.

Initially, we are introduced to Thora. She was raised by her undertaker father, so she has an unusual understanding of the rituals of grief in their world. Initially, it seems much like the Victorian era: the society is a patriarchal one, with women having almost no control over their own lives; women receive limited education; they can only wear dresses, never pants; it is overwhelmingly heteronormative; and society doesn’t tolerate any deviation from acceptable behavior. However, it becomes clear that it is set in an alternate world that merely overlaps in some aspects once May begins to explain the death rituals that Thora has become proficient in, along with her interest in botany that was taught to her by her father. These are mentioned multiple times, yet don’t really play into the story all that much, which was disappointing.

The world-building encounters some serious problems. We get the vaguest mention of deities, but that’s really all there is. The magic system seems to be comprised of vibes alone, rather than having it be well-defined and fully realized. Additionally, I was taken out of the story multiple times by the lack of continuity in the world-building. A story set outside of our reality on Earth really shouldn’t have overlap with things unique to our world, and this one fails to live up to that. There are mentions of Latin names and phrases, which wouldn’t exist in a world that didn’t give rise to the Roman Empire, as well as Italian names and mention of French meringue. Each time it happened, it reminded me of this issue and pulled me out of the story. The Latin names for many of the plants weren’t even analogous to our world—why even come up with scientific names and not refer to them by some other, more understandable taxonomic system?

Things move really slowly in the beginning of the book, and I was so sad to realize that May hasn’t addressed the pacing issues that she struggled with in her other book. I don’t mind if a book moves a little slower at first, especially if it rounds out the world, the magic system, and the important characters, but this isn’t quite what happens in this book. I was disappointed to realize that we were offered a lot of information which becomes immediately irrelevant to the story itself. But perhaps the biggest letdown was the way the story itself unfolded. 

Despite being determined to study botany since she began learning about it with her father, Thora is aware that she’s likely to just be married off to another man since she has no assets or possessions of her own. But just when all seems lost, she is given the incredibly rare gift of admission to a university to study botany! She has the opportunity to live her dream, but one view of this mysterious woman who only tends to the garden near her window at night and she forgets about her lifelong dream to pursue what is essentially insta-lust for this woman, who she learns is named Olea, and is confined to the garden of dangerous, toxic plants and the tower she lives in by a curse. 

Along the way, we are also introduced to Leonardo, who becomes a friend to Thora, yet doesn’t really have much going in the way of personality or depth aside from a sense of loss for the wife who left him. Instead, he seems to find one subject, usually the one that Thora isn’t willing to get into, and stick doggedly with that. Either that or serve as her verbal punching bag. But seriously, she is awful to poor Leonardo, and he just keeps coming back for more. Speaking of flat, Olea is a pretty flat character, and doesn’t ever speak up for herself, except for once close to the end of the book. 

Once the pace picks up a little, things quickly become repetitive. The characters all have endless repetitions of what is essentially the exact same conversation, to the point where one of the characters even acknowledges this in dialogue. It was so similar that it felt like things were moving faster, but were just repeats of earlier scenes ad nauseam. I struggled with caring at all about the toxic relationship that blooms (yeah, pun intended this time) because Olea is so one-dimensional that she’s basically the character equivalent of ‘just vibes,’ and from the moment Thora encounters her, she just chases after this character and completely regresses with all the progress she starts to make. 

The central themes of the story were seeking freedom contrasted with having little or no autonomy, obsession and addiction, and toxic plants being researched for medical purposes juxtaposed with the toxic relationship between Thora and Olea. Thora specifically mentions things that gave me red flags for addiction—a creeping sense of malaise when away from the garden (yep, got me again, another plant pun), being unable to stay away, feeling intoxicated when able to interact with Olea, loss of interest in anything other than Olea and the garden, risky behavior to get close to Olea, and even withdrawal symptoms. However, the toxic nature of the relationship and Olea’s calm acceptance of her confinement compared to Thora’s fierce desire for freedom are a recipe for disaster, and they develop a supremely unhealthy relationship dynamic. These two swing between the same conversation and sex, with very little deviation.

Overall, this was a lackluster follow up to the outstanding debut, and left me with some mixed feelings. The ending left the most to be desired, finishing where it made the least sense to end, and leaving exactly nothing wrapped up had me feeling as though there should have been either more, or the book should have ended earlier. The ending of the book made no sense, and while this appears to be a standalone, the way it left off seems to need a sequel to answer any of the questions. I did like the way it portrayed an addiction so realistically, even as everything else felt less and less real. There’s plenty of sapphic spice in this book, but there’s even more sapphic yearning and angst. I wasn’t sure why Thora began dropping f-bombs more often as the story went on, but it seemed excessive even to me, and I love my profanity as much as the next trucker. So if you do undertake (another pun mwahahahaha) reading this book, go into with the understanding that it isn’t going to be overly like the reading experience from Wild and Wicked Things so you can manage your expectations. I promise I’ll stop with all the puns now.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links, and I may earn a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase through my links.