I am generally pretty excited when someone whose short fiction I've been noticing and enjoying has a novel coming out... of course sometimes it doesn't work out (Seth Dickinson whyyy did you have to expand your novel from my least favorite thing you ever wrote) but sometimes it's Ninefox Gambit or the Tensorate series. So Sam J. Miller's The Art of Starving was on my to-read list even before it made both the Norton (Nebula) and YA/Not The Lodestar (Not A Hugo) finalists. And I really liked it.

Before I elaborate on my rec, though, I just want to make a big content note, which is that this is a first-person POV from a teen with an eating disorder, and the text is really right there in the details of that (and the distorted thinking he has going on around bodies and food). I am happy to answer questions from anyone who might need to know more specifics in order to decide whether they can safely/comfortably read this book.

That said, some comparisons: you might enjoy this if you liked Holly Black's Darkest Part of the Forest, or Patrick Ness's More Than This or The Rest Of Us Just Live Here, or Donnie Darko. And I'm going to do the rest of my discussing behind this nice spoiler cut.

So I really enjoy "is this supernatural or is this delusional" when it's done well, going back to, like, Egypt Game and Headless Cupid in my distant youth, and Miller, imo, did it really well. (Or "this started as a game, and now we can't tell whether it became real or we just got caught up in it".) Possibly I have already given the game away by comparing it to sff works and not non-sff teen contemporaries, but then, I mostly *know* sff, so it's not like I actually have a good pool of non-sff to draw comparisons from anyways. The Goodreads reviews are full of people being like "what the fuck was up with this weird spec-fic stuff, why'd he have to put *that* in", so possibly I had a better experience coming in from the sff side than the teen side? I really loved it as a slow, zoomed-in, high-res origin story (I want to say "gritty" but gritty is so overused), like, I wanted to compare it to Unbreakable, but that's just too obvious, right? And it's not quite... Miller did a fantastic job with the powers, the way he introduced and elaborated on them, but he also did a fantastic job making the heart of the story not about the powers. Really a character/relationship driven story. (And I so admire Miller for realizing that "oh god is he going to get help before they lose their health insurance??" is in fact a more tension-filled story beat than anything involving, like, a "bad guy" could have been.) In my dreams, he writes a sequel centered on Maya (although I can see how writing a girl might feel like a bigger stretch, Miller himself having been a gay teen boy.) Anyways, I was worried at the beginning that either the eating disorder stuff was going to be too awful to have to get through, or stuff would happen with the powers that was too embarrassment-squick to enjoy, but in fact I thought Miller hit just the right level (for me, at least) of painful and brutal but not unreadable (and really not embarrassment-squicky at all). I was constantly like "oh honey, no", but it was always sympathetic rather than frustrated, if that makes sense.