Delicious Foods by James Hannaham
My rating: 4/5 cats
…what’s helpless always gon take the biggest part of the rage.
4.5-5 stars cats
your response to the opening scene of this book is a pretty good indicator of whether or not this book is for you:
a young man named eddie with (very) recently amputated hands drives a car towards an unknown location, fleeing an unknown situation, struggling to deal with both the horrors he has witnessed and the struggle of manipulating objects with his tender stumps.
if you think “awesome! tell me more!”, welcome to delicious foods.
if you think “guh-ross! that sounds horrifying!”, you are correct, but should probably steer clear.
for me, this scene was the best intro to a book ever, and i was instantly engaged, wanting to know more.
the big hook to this novel is that it is a story of modern slavery, based on real but stranger-than-fiction circumstances, in which one-third of the narrative is delivered by crack. which is interesting, sure, but i’ve encountered plenty of anthropomorphism in my reading, and it was this opening scene, more than the novelty of a drug being given a voice (although it is, unsurprisingly, a seductively charming voice) that kept me hooked.
the story jumps around between the voices of eddie, his mother darlene, and “scotty” a.k.a. crack. after the sudden death of eddie’s father, darlene deals with her grief through the sweet oblivion of narcotics, which casual self-medicating eventually escalates to crack. from that point on, it is a familiar story. crack does what crack does, and when darlene doesn’t come home one night, eleven-year-old eddie finds himself walking the streets where women walk the streets, searching for her.
darlene, however, has been lured off of those streets and into a van with similarly beaten-down, supposedly unmissable men and women, and promised a job on a farm, where her expenses will be taken care of and she will be given lodgings, good pay, and more crack for hard but rewarding work. attracted to the possibility of improving her situation for herself and for eddie, darlene goes along, only to find herself held as a virtual prisoner in squalid surroundings, kept docile with a constant supply of drugs, and accruing debts far outstripping what she earns for her backbreaking labors on the farm.
this book covers a lot of ground. it is a survival story, a family story, a story of grief and its aftermath, race and love and the undocumented disenfranchised, and how slippery is that slope.
it’s a strange little book. it is both bleak and hopeful and occasionally very funny, such as when eddie is wondering if he has died, and is just waiting to be given either a robe or horns and a tail: …he had learned while following his mother around that anything you needed from a white person at a desk always took extra time and required you to sign a lot of papers. and the scene in which we find out the circumstances leading to the loss of eddie’s hands is perfect grim slapstick.
i wasn’t crazy about the final 1/4 of the book – there is a change in circumstance that i was really hoping would go in more of a v.c. andrews/gothic direction, but didn’t, and after that point the characters’ motivations became a little blurry to me. but for the most part, this was a fantastic and gripping read, and one of those books whose central themes of dignity and redemption and the tenacity of love and the human spirit are utterly compelling and necessary.
oh, and that cover!! must be nice to have kara walker as your cousin, amiright?
