Book Review: Eat The Ones You Love - Sarah Maria Griffin
About the book
A twisted, tangled story about workplace love-affairs and plants with a taste for human flesh from the acclaimed author of Spare and Found Parts and Other Words for Smoke.
During a visit to her local shopping mall, Shell Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window. She’s just left her fiancé, lost her job and moved home to her parents’ house.
She has to bring some good into her life, so she takes a chance. And flowers are just the good thing she’s been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine.
An orchid growing in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. The beautiful florist belongs to him, and he’ll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats - nobody he eats - can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires.
Neve. He will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves.
Infused with wit, heart and horror, this is a story about possession, monstrosity and working in retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow.
Why we love it
Imagine The Little Shop of Horrors but set in a run-down North Dublin shopping centre and without all the singing and dancing...
Wildly imaginative and sharply observed, Eat The Ones You Love is an atmospheric and engrossing novel with a uniquely Irish sense of place.
The story follows Shell Pine who ends up back in her overcrowded childhood home, lonely, unemployed and desperately in need of a fresh start, after her life implodes around her.
On a whim, she takes a job in a floristry shop in the Woodbine Crown Mall, the sort of decaying and decrepit shopping centre that exists in so many towns and cities around the country, littered with empty shop units nobody wants and perpetually under threat of closure from land developers.
But hidden within the rotting walls and floors of this particular shopping centre is a sentient and insatiable plant called Baby. If you're thinking 'feed me, Seymour', you'd be right - Baby is hungry, controlling and knows how to get what it wants.
Thankfully (for me, at least!) much of the horror of Baby’s nature is implied, shown almost entirely through the internal thoughts, fears and desires of the various characters in the novel.
Shell herself isn’t always the most likeable character, especially at the start of the book. She’s more than a little narcissistic and has a tendency to curate her life through the lens of social media (though to be fair who nowadays isn't occasionally guilty of that?).
But as the story unfolds, she begins to rediscover her sense of self, forming an unexpected connection with her boss, Neve, and finding new confidence through her work and her friendships with other retail staff within the fading mall.
Anyone who’s ever worked in retail will recognise the familiar rhythm and chaos of life working in a shopping centre - the ebb and flow of customers and deliveries, the strangely co-dependent camaraderie between staff, and that peculiar sense of time that exists in long days spent entirely under fluorescent lighting. It’s this recognisable authenticity that keeps the story grounded in reality, even amid the surreal chaos of a ravenous, sentient plant lurking behind the walls.
Eat The Ones You Love is quite possibly one of the strangest books I’ve read all year, but Sarah Maria Griffin’s lush and intimate writing made it impossible to put down. Utterly compelling and I loved it!
