Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang was a weird story.
The plot sounded good on paper, an apocalypse-type scenario with smog spreading across the world and blocking out the sun, which prevented food crops from growing. People everywhere were starving, although the narrator, a young, female, Chinese-American chef working at a restaurant in London with access to frozen fish, dried herbs and a miracle mung-protein flour that grew in the dark, was luckier than most.
When the un-named narrator took a job as a private chef for a wealthy Italian man and his daughter, Aida, who owned a mountain-top that occasionally saw the sun, she suddenly had ingredients available to her that hadn’t been seen anywhere else in years. Some of the foods she cooked for her boss’s extremely wealthy guests were from massive underground storehouses, while others were grown in labs beneath the mountain-top compound by Aida and her team of scientists. Some of the meat the narrator cooked was from animals that had previously been extinct, as Aida and her father played God, deciding what species of animal or plants they would continue to grow.
I thought it particularly odd when the narrator began a relationship with Aida, especially after Aida’s father expanded the narrator’s job description to include impersonating his missing wife, Aida’s mother, at formal dinners and functions.
I think I would have enjoyed the story better had it been less literary.
The characters were cold. It was hard to get to know them, which in turn made it hard to get to like them. The sumptuous descriptions of food was the only thing that kept me turning the pages.
Strawberries, bread, clotted cream and sour Heritage apples. Honey and wine, peanuts and macadamias. Panna cotta and fruit butters. Wild carrots. Barely a page went by without the description of a taste or smell of something lovely.
Karissa from Karissa Reads Books reviewed Land of Milk and Honey just before I started reading this book and she makes some interesting points about the plot.
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Comments on: "Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang" (10)
I’m not sure what to think! I’ll admit the plot sounds intriguing and I would love the food descriptions, but the characters you’ve described put me off. I probably won’t seek it out. (Of course I’m sure I’ll go straight to my digital library to see if it’s there 🙄)
I can’t decide whether to recommend Land of Milk and Honey to you or not! The plot was intriguing but the characters were so cold and strange and generally unlikeable.
The food, though… thinking about this book makes me want to read recipe books while eating nice things 🙂
Well it’s at my library, so I tagged it for future reference. 😉
In that case, I’ll look out for your review 🙂
sounds delicious!
🙂
I kinda hate the characters already! All that food while the rest of the world starves – yes, I know it already happens in real life, but they could at least pretend to feel guilty about it. And I don’t like the idea of bringing animals back from extinction just so they can eat them! I hope they met a sticky end… 😉
They were actually trying to create food for the rest of the world, but bringing extinct animals back to life so they could taste them was a chilling thought. Playing God and deciding what food or animals could continue was chilling, too. It was a very strange but thought-provoking story.
I think we had largely the same reaction to this one. I like Zhang’s writing and I’ll read her again but this didn’t get to where I hoped it would.
Agreed, this author shows a lot of promise.