Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

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.

Book Review: Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang