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A Review of The Hunger We Pass Down

Book cover for The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee. Image on cover is a dark watercolour painting of a young Asian woman who is looking over her shoulder at the audience with a serious and longing expression on her face. Her shoulders are slightly hunched as if she’s tired or maybe doesn’t have good posture. Title: The Hunger We Pass Down

Author: Jen Sookfong Lee

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Publication Date: September 9, 2025

Genres: Mystery, Fantasy, Paranormal, Contemporary, Historical

Length: 384 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

 

Jordan Peele’s Us meets The School For Good Mothers in this horror-tinged intergenerational saga, as a single mother’s doppelganger forces her to confront the legacy of violence that has shaped every woman in their family.

Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online cloth diaper shop, her resentful teenage daughter Luna, and her screen-obsessed son Luca, Alice can never get everything done in a day. It’s all she can do to just collapse on the couch with a bottle of wine every night.

It’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning and everything has been done. The counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, orders are neatly packed and labeled. But no one confesses they’ve helped, and Alice doesn’t remember staying up late. Someone–or something–has been doing her chores for her.

Alice should be uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who begins to share their haunted family history from Alice’s great-grandmother, a comfort woman during WWII, through to Alice herself. But the family demons, both real and subconscious, are about to become impossible to ignore.

Sharp and incisive, The Hunger We Pass Down traces the ways intergenerational trauma transforms from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break that cycle.

Content Warning: Alcoholism, kidnapping, rape, pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, childbirth, mental health (depression and, depending on how one interprets certain scenes, delusions and hallucinations), domestic violence, car accident, cancer, murder, and demonic possession.  I will not be discussing these topics in my review. 

Review:

What does it mean to be a survivor?

This was a heavy read at times, but it was also an important one. It’s easy to sanitize the past but much more difficult to take a clear look at what previous generations endured and how their experiences can still affect even those descendants who were born decades after their deaths. I found it especially interesting to take note of the personalities of the various women in this family – as nearly all of the characters were women – and see how the same habits and mannerisms echoed through the generations with some individuals being able to express much healthier versions of these traits than their mothers or grandmothers did depending on what their lives were like and how much they’d been able to heal from their trauma. I must tip my cap to Ms. Sookfong Lee for all of the work she put into crafting their personalities and giving readers small hints of how everyone was similar to each other. 

The ending did feel a little rushed to me after spending 300+ pages building up tension and digging deeply into the secrets and mysteries of the Chow family. I was expecting the final confrontation to take up much more space in the storyline than it did, and so I was let down by how quickly things were resolved. If more time had been spent on those last few chapters, I would have happy chosen a full five-star rating as this novel was otherwise an excellent example of how the horror genre can be used to explore all sorts of serious, real-world topics that many families can be reticent to talk about.

My favorite scenes were the ones that invited the audience to think about the multitude of ways that intergenerational trauma can be passed down over and over again even if someone is aware of what is happening and knows their behaviour isn’t emotionally healthy. I loved the way the author left space for readers to interpret certain scenes from a wide variety of psychological and supernatural perspectives. Was the antagonist literally real, a vivid metaphor for how generations of unresolved trauma have metaphorically haunted this family, or some combination of these two possibilities? I have my own theories about that topic but don’t want to influence anyone else’s perspective before they’ve read this. What matters is that new readers think for themselves as they encounter new clues about what is going on and trace every thread of this story from 1939 to 2025.

The Hunger We Pass Down made me yearn for a sequel.

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