Reviews
of
The Hunger Book
“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.…A memorable meditation on hunger for food and love, childhood in a totalitarian regime, and resilience.”
For someone who lived in Poland in the late 1980s, the book evokes viscerally remembered historical moments, including the Martial Law and food shortages, bread lines and the Chernobyl disaster with its iodine shot, music and songs, books and cartoons, foods, and smells. This powerful appeal to the senses is one the memoir’s greatest strengths.
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Ania Spyra,
The Hunger Book is vivid, startling, and lush with the smells of wild mushrooms and rose petal jam. This captivating family story reminds us that we hunger for more than food.
Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire
"If the ornithology textbook included chapters on resurrection and sadness (as felt through mother death tones) and was part cookbook (the absence we eat and eat), then Birds would be its remarkable introduction. Birds is an acute and moving piece written in the idiom of hunger and the loneliness, survival, suffering and love that light up its limits."
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Selah Saterstrom, Judge of the Black Warrior Review Creative Nonfiction Prize
The Hunger Book is a forthright, tender memoir about intergenerational trauma and the nuances of maternal love.
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Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword
A fascinating story of one woman’s divided loyalties, an ode and a lament told in brisk and unusual prose. Brewer does a gorgeous job of tying together the toxic and beneficial sides of mushrooms, mothers, and motherlands. A page-turner from which I learned a great deal.
Jennifer Croft, Booker Prize–winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s work
​What a rare and harrowing pleasure! Agata Izabela Brewer spins a bleak, tender, gorgeously riveting tale from material both sweepingly political and mesmerizingly intimate. The miracle—and our great good fortune—is that she survived, that she is here to tell it.
Joy Castro, author of One Brilliant Flame