How to Be Eaten

Maria Adelmann ’07

Classic fairy tale characters are re-imagined as women in a trauma support group in Adelmann’s debut novel, set in present-day New York City. The characters include one coping with the fallout of a failed romance with a psychopathic (and blue-bearded) billionaire and another who has troubling memories of being held captive in a house made of candy. “Adelmann travels the well-worn paths of some of the Brothers Grimm’s most famous fairy tales with stylistic panache and 21st-century verve,” Kirkus says in a starred review. “However, it’s her nuanced consideration of our own culpability that makes this book unique. In the end, Adelmann’s true subject is actually her audience, the great anonymous ‘we’ who consumes the horrors of violent husbands, ravaging wolves, hungry witches, and made-for-TV love stories with such compulsive demand we never pause to think what might come after the happy ending. Both a meditation on trauma and a sendup of our society’s obsession with scripted reality, this book sings.”

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