Review: Season to Taste or How to Eat Your Husband by Natalie Young

Season to Taste or How to Eat Your Husband 

by Natalie Young

Publisher: Tinder Press

Release Date: 16 January 2014

Rating: *****  

Back cover blurb: The extraordinary story of the end of a marriage and its very strange aftermath

Regular visitors to my blog will have noticed that I love crime fiction, and Natalie Young's 'Season to Taste or How to Eat Your husband' promised to be the ultimate crime novel, involving murder and cannibalism no less.

The book wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but then I'm not too sure exactly what I was expecting… 

It's not every day that you read a novel that casually drops cannibalism (and accompanying recipes) into its content.

But then 'Season to Taste' is no ordinary novel. 

We meet our protagonist Lizzie Prain as she is preparing to start cooking her husband 'he was in the freezer in sixteen bits', having bludgeoned him to death three days earlier with the garden spade. 

Lizzie, as she tells her story is concocting recipes that make use of her dead husband's body parts, as well as describing how one should clean the house and take care of things after the preparation and chosen cooking method. These take a little getting used to at first, as some are quite graphic, but I'm not sure the novel would be the same were they not included.

Its unclear whether Lizzie is trying to make herself feel better by writing the recipes and such down, or if she wants to help others that may have ended up in a situation similar to hers. For, I get the feeling that Lizzie does not see herself in a particularly unusual situation.

Perhaps she has driven herself mad with the scale of the crime that she has committed. Or perhaps she has just deluded herself into believing that she has done nothing wrong. One thing for certain is that Lizzie Prain refuses to go to jail for murdering her husband. She feels that she her broken marriage was sufferance enough, and she is determined once she has finished 'disposing' of his body, that she will begin a new life in Scotland.

Will she make it? Well you'll have to read it to find out.... 

This novel is not for the faint hearted, but if you enjoy a little bit of black humour then you will love it. You just might not see meat in the same light ever again.

You can purchase Season to Taste or How to Eat Your Husband from Amazon online and all good book shops.

A big Thank You to Bookbridgr who approved my request for this novel.