Celadon Partner

Hunger Like a Thirst Review

Book: Hunger Like a Thirst
Author: Besha Rodell
Publisher: Celadon Books
Year: 2025
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “When Besha Rodell moved from Australia to the United States with her mother at fourteen, she was a foreigner in a new land, missing her friends, her father, and the food she grew up eating. In the years that followed, Rodell began waitressing and discovered the buzz of the restaurant world, immersing herself in the lifestyle and community while struggling with the industry’s shortcomings. As she built a family, Rodell realized her dream, though only a handful of women before her had done it : to make a career as a restaurant critic.
From the streets of Brooklyn to lush Atlanta to sunny Los Angeles to traveling and eating around the world and, finally, home to Australia, Rodell takes us on a delicious, raw, and fascinating journey through her life and career and explores the history of criticism and dining and the cultural shifts that have turned us all into food obsessives. Hunger Like a Thirst shares the joys and hardships of coming of age, the amazing (and sometimes terrible) meals she ate along the way, and the dear friends she made in each restaurant, workplace, and home.”

Review : I don’t receive nonfiction advanced copies with any kind of regularity, but when I do, they’re almost always a revelation. Hunger Like a Thirst is no exception. Written by one of the world’s last anonymous food critics, Besha Rodell, Hunger, as poignant as it is comforting, is laid out as courses on our table, each more decadent, more revealing, than the last. Like a blooming onion (yes she has reviewed Outback Steakhouse), Rodell gently peels back the layers of the decadent food world, the culture that simultaneously shaped our tastes and was shaped by our foodie interests, exploring the ways in which food is inherently political, all the while laying herself bare before us, her own heart on our plate. Delicious, rich, funny and equally heartbreaking, overwhelming, and steeped in grief that is not just Rodell’s but my own, Hunger is an absolute must-read.

From living on food stamps to traveling internationally for Food & Wine, Rodell guides us through the often unbalanced and winding journey of a restaurant critic, describing the sheer financial cost of dining out multiple nights per week, often at her own expense, traveling to find the best, the newest, the most creative gem, often alone. She explains the dichotomy of loneliness she feels as she travels the world and the claustrophobia she feels at being back home, the seemingly impossible go-go-go of jet setting from place to place, while being just a few miles shy of landmarks she promised her father she’d see in her lifetime, while not afforded the time or leisure to visit while traveling for work. Hunger is far more than a memoir of good (and sometimes bad) food. Rodell shares her life, her travels outside of work, and the friendships she’s made both in the restaurant industry and in her career as one of only a dozen or so restaurant critics in the country.

Each chapter reads like an in depth exploration of not only the history of food culture and specific food phenomena, but as a dive into the world of a woman working in a predominantly male driven industry. Rodell tackles bigger global issues with ease, often discussing racial disparities, misogyny, and the way in which the world of food has expanded, sometimes at a snail’s pace, to meet a broadening world. She explains the history of women in the service industry through deep dives into the nation’s first chain restaurants and talks about what it’s like to be a woman who continues to work in this industry where women are expected to largely be one thing : gentle. From a background in Alt Weekly publications, Rodell writes in a way that feels comfortable and familiar, like you’re listening to your favorite person rant about their special interest. She’s approachable and funny and foul-mouthed in exactly the way you’d hope, telling slightly horrifying tales from her teenage years as a recent transplant in the US from Australia, talking about the culture that seeps over from punk music into the back of house of a food service gig, all the while remaining real and human and, though not, somehow tangible.

I don’t think any book of this sort could be written without addressing some of the harder aspects of industry work, like drug abuse and suicide. Rodell navigates each with grace and grief, speaking about people she and her husband have both worked with and lost, her husband’s own substance struggles, and drawing parallels in her own internal world to the monumental loss of Anthony Bourdain. Rodell brings the truth and the grit and the heartache of the restaurant world to the reader in a way that feels tender and gentle, written with care and heart. Everything she addresses is important in it’s own way, but this aspect perhaps most of all.

As someone who has never worked in the food service industry but, like so many others, loves watching Top Chef, I found Hunger to be exciting and enjoyable on yet another level. Reading about the foundational restaurants and seminal chefs throughout the decades Rodell shares of her life, it was so fun to hear new stories of people I’ve become familiar with through my favorite cooking show and to learn some of the history involved. Rodell speaks of living in New York during 2001, of feeding diners mere days after the twin towers were hit, and of the chefs who fed first responders. She talks about incredible chefs and restaurants in Atlanta and Los Angeles, and shares her hometown in Melbourne, Australia with us. She shares her husband’s realized dream of opening his own restaurant, an endeavor set to open in 2020, and the indescribable, and perhaps insurmountable, grief that came with that timing. She brings us into her world and shares it in such a way that by the time you’re done reading, Besha Rodell feels like an old friend. Every aspect of this book, from start to finish, is perfection. It’s comfort food.

Advice : If you’re into fine dining or finding holes in the wall or eating where the locals eat or the ins and outs of what it’s like to eat at the best spots in LA, if you love watching Top Chef or Chopped or reading up on the newest spot in town, if you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to be an anonymous food reviewer and restaurant critic, this is an absolute must read. I have a hard time saying there’s any reason not to read it, unless for some reason you hate food and don’t enjoy memoirs. Pick it up, it’s released on May 13th. It’s truly excellent.

Like Happiness Review

Book: Like Happiness
Author: Ursula Villarreal-Moura
Publisher: Celadon
Year: 2024
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “It’s 2015 and Tatum Vega feels that her life is finally falling into place. Living in sunny Chile with her partner, Vera, she spends her days surrounded by art at the museum where she works. More than anything else, she loves this new life for helping her forget the decade she spent in New York City orbiting the brilliant and famous author M. Domínguez.
When a reporter calls from the US asking for an interview, the careful separation Tatum has constructed between her past and present begins to crumble. Domínguez has been accused of assault, and the reporter is looking for corroboration.
As Tatum is forced to reexamine the all-consuming but undefinable relationship that dominated so much of her early adulthood, long-buried questions surface. What did happen between them? And why is she still struggling with the mark the relationship left on her life?
Told in a dual narrative alternating between her present day and a letter from Tatum to Domínguez, recounting and reclaiming the totality of their relationship, Like Happiness explores the nuances of a complicated and imbalanced relationship, catalyzing a reckoning with gender, celebrity, memory, Latinx identity, and power dynamics.”

Review : Like Happiness, as Villarreal-Moura writes in the acknowledgements, “is a book about loving books”. Incredibly literary, not only did it tick all the boxes in my soul that feel like satisfying brain-floss, it also rang some bells of familiarity that cannot be overlooked. This is a powerfully moving debut novel detailing the uneven footing of the power dynamic between a popular contemporary male writer and a younger female fan (notably, eight years younger). Feeling out of place with few friends at her Massachusetts college during her undergrad program, texas native Tatum makes a bold move one evening, penning a letter to the author of her new favorite book, Happiness. The author, M, is gaining popularity with his breakout novel of short stories detailing the lives of Latinx individuals in the United States. Feeling seen and understood in a way she has not felt in literary circles yet, particularly on a nearly all white college campus where she’s an art history, english lit double major, finding herself immersed in required reading of white Euro centric authors, Tatum feels at home with M’s book. She writes to M and within a few weeks, he writes back, thus beginning a multi-year long relationship between Mateo (M) and Tatum.

Like Happiness is a dual perspective book, though it doesn’t bounce around nearly as much as you may be accustomed to in a book with multiple narrators or points of view. Told largely through the lens of 2015 Tatum, far removed from her relationship with Mateo, writing a detailed account of her often one-sided relationship with Mateo, and a slightly earlier 2015 version of Tatum, receiving a phone call from a reporter in the States, calling because her relationship is celebrated fact and Mateo has been publicly criticized and outed as an abuser. It has been years since Tatum has spoken to Mateo and while she never experienced the abuses so many women are stepping forward to name, she is sure he isn’t an innocent party, both with the other women and with her. Choosing to tell her story to the reporter, she simultaneously decides to tell her story to Mateo and afford herself the closure she was never granted in the past.

Villarreal-Moura spins a tale of power imbalances, grooming behavior, and codependency that at times feels so real it’s hard to remember this is fiction and not a memoir. Over the span of nearly 300 pages, she outlines patterns of abuse so subtle they could almost go overlooked, laying them out chronologically, revealing a masterpiece of manipulation when the final product is fully revealed. **Spoilers Ahead**
Laying the groundwork for Mateo’s ultimate betrayal quite early on, Villarreal-Moura is an expert at building a scene. Not only is Mateo a college professor and author, he is a force of magnetism and power in Tatum’s life. He pulls her into his orbit and expects her to stay just where she is, mesmerized and fawning over his very being. He relies on her for attention, commitment, and praise while expecting her to simply go along with whatever he wants to do – and she does. He so encompasses her world that when he’s in it all others cease to exist. Mateo subtly punishes Tatum when she gets a serious boyfriend, though she and Mateo have never approached much more than a platonic relationship, he cuts her down and pokes fun of her intelligence when she doesn’t give him exactly what he wants, and pays off $20,000 of her school loans, leaving her helpless to the encompassing power he now wields over her. 

I don’t want to give away the ending, but know these subtle manipulations are nothing compared to the ultimate betrayal Tatum experiences at the hands of Mateo in the end. Putting a final nail in the coffin of their friendship, she is finally able to extricate herself from the leeching parasite of M, allowing her to write her final letter, this book, to him; knowing it will be the closure she needs in order to fully live her life without his shadow in it. As I read, I couldn’t help but be reminded of an article a read a few years ago about an author whose work I’d read and loved, Nick Flynn. And as I thought about that article, I couldn’t help but be reminded of another, similar, articled I’d read around the same time about another author whose work I’d read and loved, Junot Diaz. Both were published authors, one a professor and the other a keynote speaker, both took advantage of women who were younger than them, women who were still in college. Flynn, in particular, has since been accused by multiple women of abuse and misconduct. There is nothing new about this story, though that doesn’t in any detract from Like Happiness; if anything, I found it gave this book extra connective tissue. There’s a precedent here : men in positions of power who wield that power over unsuspecting women who are at a disadvantage due either to their age or their position (a student vs a professor). It’s common. And therefor, it needs to be told. Villarreal-Moura did a profoundly wonderful job telling it.

Advice : If you love reading books about people who love reading books, Like Happiness is truly wonderful. Villarreal-Moura has introduced me to so many things, though none quite as exciting as my new favorite snack of frozen grapes. If you love reading fiction that’s so perfect and timely that it could easily be memoir, this is it. I highly recommend it.