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Book: “The Hunger We Pass Down” by Jen Soofong Lee
Publishing Info: Erewhon Books, September 2025
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an ARC from the publisher at ALAAC25
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online cloth diaper shop, her resentful teenage daughter Luna, and her screen-obsessed son Luca, Alice can never get everything done in a day. It’s all she can do to just collapse on the couch with a bottle of wine every night.
It’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning and everything has been done. The counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, orders are neatly packed and labeled. But no one confesses they’ve helped, and Alice doesn’t remember staying up late. Someone–or something–has been doing her chores for her.
Alice should be uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who begins to share their haunted family history from Alice’s great-grandmother, a comfort woman during WWII, through to Alice herself. But the family demons, both real and subconscious, are about to become impossible to ignore.
Sharp and incisive, The Hunger We Pass Down traces the ways intergenerational trauma transforms from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break that cycle.
Review: Thank you to Erewhon Books for providing an ARC of this novel at ALAAC25!
I know that there are probably a fair number of people who are getting a bit tired of horror that acts as metaphors for trauma and grief, but I do not share their concerns. I’m still all about horror being used to tell stories about the human experience in creative ways, and I don’t see myself getting bored of it any time soon. This is one of the reasons I was definitely interested in reading “The Hunger We Pass Down” by Jen Soofong Lee, a new ghost story that examines a couple generation of Chinese-Canadian women who have been dealing with a lot of tragedy and loss, possibly because of a family curse that has been passing down since World War II. I was excited to read it, but I can also tell you that I wasn’t prepared for the emotional wallop it was going to bring.
The idea of a cursed family standing in for generational trauma is always going to be catnip for me, and “The Hunger We Pass Down” is a solid example of that. We have the Chow Family, with mother Alice still dealing with the fallout of her divorce as she tries to care for her kids Luna and Luca while also running a successful online business. She feels stretched thin, but starts to find the house tidied up and her online orders ready to go though she has no memory of doing any kind of work towards any of it. We also follow up the family line, going all the way back to World War II Hong Kong where her great grandmother Gigi was being used as a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers, abused, held against her will, and raped. Which is where the family curse starts. As a horror story we have ghosts, we have doppelgangers, and we have lots of loss, violence, and tension. Lee handles the dread well, and the descriptions of the various spirits and spectres were pretty unsettling, even terrifying at times. I kept thinking of myths of vengeful spirits who take out rage on anyone in their way, and Lee really creates something truly scary here.
And as mentioned above, I do like the metaphor we have at hand, and I found that to be a strong element of this book as well. The trauma of captivity and sexual abuse and rape is something that Gigi has to endure as a ‘comfort woman’ in Hong Kong, and the generational trauma passes down throughout the generations from mother to daughter. What really struck me is that this is also a very heavy family saga, and the bleakness of the way that violence can rewire a persona and keep cycles going just oozes off the page. It’s deeply emotional and it just works, even if I found it a very hard read at times. It’s a well done story to be sure, but man you really need to steel yourself for it. I also found the ending a little bit abrupt, and while it absolutely made sense for what the overall theme was, it still kind of felt like there could have and maybe should have been more. These aren’t bad things, but I was a LITTLE unsatisfied, and had I realized this was more literary I probably could have better prepared myself for it, emotionally.
“The Hunger We Pass Down” is emotional and creepy, and it’s filled with lots of real world terrors to round out the ghostly ones. I found it to be well done, and very, very sad.
Rating 7: A bleak and emotional family saga about multiple generations of women and curse passing from mothers to daughters, “The Hunger We Pass Down” is scary, but more sad than anything else.
Reader’s Advisory:
“The Hunger We Pass Down” is included on the Goodreads list “She’s Not Feeling Good at All: Sad Female Characters”.
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