What happens when the person you thought you would spend the rest of your life with drops an unexpected bombshell that brings everything to an end? In her new book, Hungry Love, Tomiko Diaz explores these turning points in life, new beginnings, and, especially, the different kinds of love that fill our lives.
When Jared Jones, Ava Diaz’s boyfriend of eight years, realizes he needs to explore a different path — one that doesn’t include her — Ava must envision an entirely new life for herself. But where do you even begin when everything you’ve built over nearly a decade disappears?
Ava comes to understand that, after losing almost everything, life can rebuild itself in unexpected ways when there is no longer any ground beneath your feet.
By the time Gavin Jones, Jared’s brother, truly enters Ava’s life, and not in the measured doses he had over the previous eight years, he turns everything upside down. He offers her a safe space where she can rebuild herself and heal her heart. He hardly seems like the same gruff, curt Gavin who used to pull away whenever Ava walked into the room. She never realized Gavin’s behavior was a defense mechanism to protect his already broken heart.
Hungry Love is the kind of love story you always want in your life. The characters start living rent-free in your head, and there’s no going back.
You want to be Ava’s friend and tell her to take the time she needs to heal, but not to be afraid to dare to love again; you want to tell Kiki that you support her, and Jared that he was right to follow his heart, even if his first steps weren’t exactly the wisest. (No, Jared, you do not drop a bomb in the middle of dinner at a restaurant, somewhere between the condiments and the tears of a woman who is realizing you’re leaving her.)
But most of all, you want to tell Gavin to take the leap and go all in, because in trying not to hurt anyone, you can end up hurting yourself, and everyone else, even more.
There’s something irresistible about a quiet kind of love that yearns, that waits. The kind where no one dares to put it into words, yet somehow they say everything.
The kind of love that looks at you “like he never stopped hoping.” Like a Mr. Darcy — the first great love of so many readers — Gavin, too, had to earn that love.
But beyond conventional love, Hungry Love also explores other kinds of love, because there isn’t just one right way. Realizing that can be frightening, but what if you want everything love has to offer, just in a different way? There’s nothing far-fetched about that. Ava’s friend Kiki and Jared show us as much; limiting ourselves to just one kind of love, on the other hand, can lead us down the wrong paths.
There aren’t many characters like Kiki in literature, film, or television, which is why she deserves a special mention. She deserves a love story of her own because she has refused to give up on love. Finding someone, however, can be more complicated when things like asexuality come into play, because society often makes it seem as though true love can only exist within certain standards.
Beyond the human characters who make up the story, there are others that are just as important: the music, the food, and the setting. Let’s start with Orcas Island, a dreamlike place that is far more than just a backdrop. The island becomes part of what you breathe, what nourishes you, and the future that begins to take shape — peaceful and laid-back, yet hopeful in a way only an island can make possible.
Ava, Jared, and Gavin are united by their love of good music, and the book moves to the beat of those rhythms as the story unfolds. You can feel in tune with them as you read. Toward the end of the book, you’ll find the playlist along with a QR code to listen to it on Spotify, a special touch that makes the most of technology while helping you feel even closer to the characters.
But what truly makes up the soul of the book, besides love, is food. Ava expresses what she feels through food, much like Tita did in Like Water for Chocolate. After all, Ava is also part Mexican, and with that comes an inherent love of food and its slow, experimental processes.
Ava heals broken hearts through food, an unconventional profession she never would have found if it weren’t for her own broken heart.
As she heals hers, in a place that for many would represent nothing more than an escape from reality, she finds a home, a community, a purpose, and, most importantly, true love.
After all, Ava is, as Gavin puts it, one of “the people who make us hungry for life.”
Tomiko Diaz is the rom-com pen name of author Ayn Gailey, a name that pays tribute to her Latin and Asian roots. She and her editors at St. Ōde Press, an independent publisher based on Orcas Island in the Pacific Northwest, sent me this wonderful copy of her book. They, too, are among those people who, from behind the words, awaken in us a hunger for life.