If you grew up in a place with malls, plural, you know there is always a hierarchy. There’s the fancy mall and the tragic mall; the mall you want to go to and the mall you would really rather not be stuck in; the default mall and the mythical mall (the one you were intensely curious about but somehow never got to visit).
The Woodbine Crown, the mall at the center of Sarah Maria Griffin’s Eat the Ones You Love, is yet another breed of mall: the dying mall. The Woodbine Crown is going to close, and everyone knows it. But it isn’t gone yet. The fading mall is still home to a multiplicity of vape shops and, by and large, the kind of shops that don’t work so well online. A photocopy joint, a salon, and a travel agent’s all exist in this mall.
So does a florist.
When you hear “flower shop” and “sentient person-eating plant,” it is reasonable to think, “Oh, yes: Little Shop of Horrors.” By and large, the rest of the details are quite different in Sarah Maria Griffin’s Eat the Ones You Love. Shell Pine has moved home after the dissolution of her long-term relationship with a man referred to only as “Gav.” She is also out of a job, and basically out of friends, the ones she shared with Gav having turned out to be perhaps not the greatest company. When she spots the ”help needed” sign in the florist window, she sees an opportunity. Maybe a chance to reinvent herself.
And for a single chapter, maybe, the story is hers. After that, though, it belongs to Baby.
Baby is a plant, or something that takes the shape of a plant—kind of like an orchid but really, really not. Baby lives in the dark terrarium at the heart of the mall, and Baby has his tendrils in just about everything, from the deserted hallways to the bodies of the people who spend their lives in his space. Baby, not Shell, is the real narrator here. Baby know these people. Baby sees all. And Baby wants to grow.
Neve, the mysterious and alluring florist in the Woodbine Crown, tends Baby along with her shop. Their history is long, and fraught, and, yes, somewhat bloody. People have gone missing. Neve’s ex, Jen, left not long after Neve introduced her to Baby. (Jen, who studies orchids, knows a bad thing when she sees it.) Neve needs more than just help in the shop, and Baby needs more than just one person to tend and feed him. Especially since he would like Neve for his very own. Heart and all.
Griffin skillfully balances Baby’s desire and demands with something a little more down to earth. (Or maybe a little less down to earth; this is a plant we’re talking about.) Alongside its horrors, Eat the Ones You Love is a layered and lovely portrayal of friendship and finding yourself at home in unexpected places—about different ways of knowing people, and the strange, easy, or uncomfortable ways people weave in and out of your life.
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Eat the Ones You Love
Shell, who reinvents her entire online presence to be about the bouquets she learns to make, is in a liminal emotional state as well as the fading third-place space of the mall, stuck in between the person she was with Gav and the person she wants to be around Neve, who is attractive and friendly and almost entirely wrapped up in Baby. She has been resisting him, to a degree, for a while now. But he’s very persistent.
Neve shares her shop with Shell, and she shares her friends, too: a gaggle of mall employees who meet after-hours in the food court to drink and swap stories and who understand one another in that way that people who work public-facing jobs so often understand one another. (Have you worked retail at the holidays? You and I could swap stories for hours, I bet.) There’s Kiero, younger than the rest and employed in the photocopy joint; Bec, the glamorous travel agent; and Daniel, the hairstylist, who knew Shell in high school.
Daniel is the best, but he is also the person that reminds Shell that she used to be a different version of herself. The past keeps tugging at her, trying to hold her still, even as she outgrows it (kind of like a plant getting too big for his mall). Shell has to learn to be a florist, learn to fall in love with Neve, and learn how to be more discerning about the people in her life. People give you space, or they box you up. (There’s a plant metaphor here, too, but I’m resisting the temptation.) The arguably most horrible thing in this book isn’t even Baby, but a dinner party that’s also a trap set by people who want to feel good about the way they are terrible to each other.
Eat the Ones You Love is a creepy botanical story about all-consuming love, but it’s also about the kinds of relationships that are really bad for you, even when they seem like the ones you’re supposed to have. If you took Baby out of this story, it would still be a wise, funny, layered book about rebuilding one’s life after it feels like it’s all come crashing down. But you can no more take Baby out of the Woodbine than, say, Buffy could set down her vampire-slaying stakes. (There’s a Buffy reference in here, a quick one, and it certainly occurred to me that the mall food court is sort of like this group’s Bronze.)
All Shell’s relationships, new and old, exist in contrast to Neve and Baby’s strange symbiosis—and the lingering friendship of Jen and Bec, which we only see via Jen’s voicey, delightful, desperate-to-hide-her-desperation emails. (Jen is American. She’s so American.) By leaving Neve, Jen left the mall and the space and the in-group created, in part, by Baby’s mostly unseen existence. She’s outside, and that outside voice is a much-needed perspective.
And Baby watches them all, watching them interact, slinking into their hearts and minds. His knowing is physical, visceral—it amps up the sensuality of all of these friends and lovers and exes, their warm skin and beating hearts and worried minds. What Baby wants is, ultimately, the same thing Shell wants: to grow. It’s just a little more ominous when that desire comes from the massive person-chomping greenery.
Eat the Ones You Love is Griffin’s adult debut, following a pair of excellent YA novels that also feature lonely young women figuring their shit out, and/or creepy monsters who are hungry for things that humans provide (willingly or less so). There’s a deep and beautiful and loving strangeness to her work, an intense intimacy in the way she describes how people are with each other. This isn’t a plot-heavy book, but one in which characters slowly—believably, terribly slowly—begin to understand their situations, be they supernatural or bitterly ordinary. (The role of social media in Shell’s dissolving friendships is depicted with knowing precision.) It’s full of longing and desire, in all their strange and ordinary forms. Love is transformative, for better or worse, and Griffin clearly understands both ways it can change a person.
Eat the Ones You Love is published by Tor Books.
