How to Be Eaten — Metadata

Orientation

Maria Adelmann's debut novel transports five fairy-tale heroines into present-day New York City, where they meet weekly in a fluorescent-lit basement support group to process the trauma of being the woman in a story men love to tell. Bernice survived a tech-billionaire Bluebeard. Ruby (Little Red) was devoured at twelve and now wears the wolf as a coat. Ashlee was crowned the winner of a reality dating show called The One. Gretel can't tell if her candy-house memories are real. Raina's love story, last in the circle, will gut everyone. Their facilitator, Will, isn't who he says he is — and when his disguise comes off mid-book, the novel turns from group therapy into a fight over who owns a woman's story. Adelmann writes in a "hodgepodge" of voices and tenses: omniscient present in the group room, first-person past inside each woman's testimony, Will's brief interludes leaking the wrongness underneath.

Cover-at-a-glance

A stylized inky-black wolf head looms head-down from the top edge of the cover, its open jaws pointed at the bottom margin and two pinprick white eyes glowing through the silhouette. Below the wolf, painted small and alone on a textured cream/parchment ground, stands a single figure of a girl in a rich red hooded cloak, her back partially to us, looking up. The title "HOW TO BE EATEN" is set inside the wolf's black silhouette in a chalky, distressed white serif. Maria Adelmann's name runs at the bottom in a slim serif. The mood is fairy-tale-storybook turned ominous — handmade, ink-on-paper, almost folk-art, but with a clear sense of menace. The palette is severely limited: deep ink black, paper cream, a single saturated red. Cover designer Julianne Lee, art by Silvan Borer.