Girl Dinner: A book review of THIS DELICIOUS DEATH by Kayla Cottingham

First, let me acknowledge that the framing of this book as Girl Dinner is not my original idea. I saw someone on Twitter post a photo from a Barnes and Noble display and thought it was pure genius. For those of you who don’t know, there is a TikTok thing going around about Girl Dinner. I know about it because my two girls keep walking around and eating food and saying in a sing song voice, “girl dinner.” It started as a joke making fun of girls for eating things like bowls of cereal and charcuterie boards for dinner, and there has been a lot of varying commentary about it. You can read some of that commentary here, here and here. The Barnes and Noble display I saw featured a lot of titles about girls/women and cannibalism and would definitely work with something like a Yellowjackets tie-in, for example. There aren’t as many teen girl cannibal books as you might think there would be, but there are a lot of great teen girl vampire books out there. There is also the book This Delicious Death.

This Delicious Death features a friendship group of teen girls who have survived a pandemic like illness called the Hollowing. They survive as members of the Hollowed, basically living people who have a hunger for human flesh. To help them survive, and to protect the rest of the human race, synthetic organs have been created and they mostly survive on this synthetic flesh. The four friends head out to a music festival with a cooler full of synthetic organs, only to stumble on a body that has clearly been eaten by a Hollowed person – was it one of them? They are now in a fight for their survival in this cool, twisty take on the zombie genre with a touch of a mystery. As someone who really enjoys the zombie and vampire genre, I really appreciated this fresh – no pun intended – take on the genre that also looks at things like female friendship, social media, pandemics and more. Highly recommend.

Here are some other Girl Dinner titles you might want to include with it for a display.

Publisher’s Book Description:

Four best friends, one music festival, and a cooler filled with human organs: this summer is about to get gory. ​​​

Jennifer’s Body fans will clamor for this new sapphic horror standalone from New York Times bestselling author Kayla Cottingham.

Three years ago, the melting of arctic permafrost released a pathogen of unknown origin into the atmosphere, causing a small percentage of people to undergo a transformation that became known as the Hollowing. Those impacted slowly became intolerant to normal food and were only able to gain sustenance by consuming the flesh of other human beings. Those who went without flesh quickly became feral, turning on their friends and family. However, scientists were able to create a synthetic version of human meat that would satisfy the hunger of those impacted by the Hollowing. As a result, humanity slowly began to return to normal, albeit with lasting fear and distrust for the people they’d pejoratively dubbed ghouls.

Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine are all ghouls living in Southern California. As a last hurrah before their graduation they decided to attend a musical festival in the desert. They have a cooler filled with hard seltzers and SynFlesh and are ready to party.

But on the first night of the festival Val goes feral, and ends up killing and eating a boy. As other festival guests start disappearing around them the girls soon discover someone is drugging ghouls and making them feral. And if they can’t figure out how to stop it, and soon, no one at the festival is safe.

Filed under: Teen Fiction