Mother for Dinner - aka Brooklyn Family Has a Lot of Issues, Dude

"Is it love that binds a family together, Seventh wondered, or just the guilt estrangement would cause?"

Seventh was born as the seventh son of the last Cannibal-American family. With thirteen siblings - though, according to their bigoted, hateful mother, the only girl didn't count - Seventh Seltzer is expected to carry on the Cannibal heritage. Beyond eating their dead, however, no one seems to know exactly what that is. The family is scattered. The father is gone. Some siblings have remained, some have stayed, and Seventh waivers in the middle. The mother?

The mother, called Mudd by her children, is dying. She has promised a fortune to her children if only they will do one thing. Eat her.

A tale of identity, culture, generational trauma, and what it means to call yourself something, 'Mother for Dinner' at first comes across as preachy. Seventh works for a publishing house, blatantly stating his distaste for the identity ridden biographies that he rejects daily. "Jewish-Fourth-Wave-Lesbian-Socialist-ProImmigration-Anti-Vax-Latinx-America" bothers Seventh as much as "Gender-Fluid-Hearing-Impaired-Liberal-Democratic-Palestinian-Canadian-America" as much as any strung together list of identities. I hated it, thoughted it seemed bigoted in its own way - until I realized that it was Seventh's own identity-related trauma speaking. He had been told all of his life that he existed only to remember the Cannibals who came before him and the create the Cannibal generation.

This plagues him through the entire book. his journey is an up-and-down rollercoaster of embracing, changing, and denying identity, all relating to one question:

Will he eat his own mother?

Overall, I enjoyed this book, with it's realistic and fascinating family dynamic. When I wasn't reading it, I found myself thinking or talking about it. However, I can't say that I loved it. Sometimes I felt too much as if the book was hitting me over the head with the identity theme, and I was not super pleased that two of his siblings, who are transwomen, where grouped together under the term "brothers." That in itself, though, might have been a sign that Seventh was switching back and forth from his own beliefs to that of his ignorant mother. He always worried about inheriting her anti-Semitic, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, racist views (which she openly discusses, so this is a book to miss if you don't want to read that sort of thing), yet find himself parroting her when things get too stressful. I was also not a fan of them discussing how fat the mother was constantly. It was on purpose, her weight gain, and was sometimes discussed in the terms of "how are we going eat all of this meat?" yet the way her body was talked about, as if it was a disgusting thing bothered me. I could justify it with the knowledge that they were disgusted by her attitude, how she had abused them, and the fact they these people knew they might have to eat her, but it still left the taste of fatphobia in my mouth. Anything where someone who is portrayed as mean and bigoted is also fat never sits well with me. For these concerns, I'm settling on 3/5 pickles.