"Ravenous"

Sara Cooper is a novelist and an award-winning playwright-lyricist. She lives in New York with her husband John and their son Theo. Major awards include Richard Rodgers Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2022); ASCAP Foundation Lucille and Jack Yellen Award (2021); Grand Jury Prize, Barnstorm Media (2020); Jonathan Larson Grant, American Theatre Wing (2014).

Ravenous, her debut novel, was a Finalist for the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.

Cooper applied the Page 69 Test to Ravenous and shared the following:

From page 69:

I’m claustrophobic. My ears are ringing. My belly button aches. Skin crawling, overstimulated, I drag my poor tender flesh shell into the hell dungeon of the kitchen before returning to the land of the living room with the stainless steel garbage can and my Messermeister Cheflamme Culinary Torch. I can smell my sweat, acrid and vile. I close my eyes and shake the contents of the dozen or so closest unpacked boxes into the bin and light them on fire.

The smoke detector begins to wail.

Daddy’s disembodied voice floats in from his office. “You okay?” it says.

“Shut the fuck up,” I say.

“What?” it says.

“Totally,” I shout, yanking the batteries free from the wretched smoke detector and yeeting my culinary torch out the window before it can start an uncontrollable chain reaction that burns down the whole neighborhood and blows up my spot.

I nurse the flame, keeping it alive but manageable, passing it from one moving box to the next with my Terrain Oaxacan Floral Taper Candle in Medium Pink. When I’ve destroyed enough that it looks like I’ve been massively productive, I drench the molten remains with the water from my S’Well and triple lock the lid.

Won’t Daddy notice you’re missing, like, half your worldly belongings?

No, Baby, no, no, no, child, no, this is why God created Amazon Prime. I can replace everything that’s missing before he even notices it’s gone and put it all away when it comes, one at a time, neatly, responsibly, without the heartache and difficulty of thought. Everything is interchangeable. There’s always more stuff.

This is a surprisingly good encapsulation of Ravenous. You get a real sense of the tone, which I would describe as fever pitch fever dream. We meet both Baby and Daddy, the two most important characters besides our narrator, Breigh. This page also hints at some of the major themes: capitalism, self-commodification, and over-consumption. I'm actually shocked at how well this test worked!

Visit Sara Cooper's website.

My Book, The Movie: Ravenous.

--Marshal Zeringue