Land of Milk and Honey: A Novel

by C Pam Zhang

Hardcover, 2023

Status

Available

Genres

Publication

Riverhead Books (2023), 240 pages

Description

"About a Chinese American chef who, lured to a decadent, enigmatic colony of the superrich in a near future in which food is disappearing, discovers the meaning of pleasure and the ethics of who gets to enjoy it, altering her life and, indirectly, the world"--

User reviews

LibraryThing member nivramkoorb

This book had good reviews and an interesting concept. A smog is now covering the world blocking light and causing crops to dry up and the whole food chain is disintegrating. A group of very wealthy people have a mountain in the Italian Alps where they are above the smog. A unnamed young chef finds

a position with them catering to the wealthy. As the book progresses we are left with the moral dilemma of the very rich being able to escape the terrors of the world of deprivation. The author leans very heavily on an onslaught of metaphors that obscure the story she is trying to tell. Ultimately it is an interesting book that raises many questions as we deal with the impacts of climate change. The book was 232 pages. Had it been longer I would have probably not finished it because the story was not compelling enough to overcome the writing style. Metaphor overload.

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LibraryThing member mojomomma

A woman who is chef is recruited to work for a very rich man as his private chef. While the rest of the world deals with food shortages due to smog, this man imports food to his mountaintop compound above the smog. Power and privilege are prominent themes, but the plot kind of gets bogged down in

the relationships with the people who show up for the infamous Sunday dinners in which diners eat things like permafrost preserved mammoth.

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LibraryThing member Gwendydd

I didn't get very far into this before I gave up. The author makes very heavy-handed use of extended food metaphors for absolutely everything, and I wasn't interested enough in the characters to muddle my way through it.

LibraryThing member brianinbuffalo

I give two "A" grades for effort. The first goes to an author who set an overly-ambitious goal to give voice to some of society’s looming crises in breakneck fashion. The second goes to me for plodding ahead with this disjointed apocalyptic tale until the one-third mark. Some reviewers say the

book improves in the second half, but I made a promise-to-self long ago to abandon works that are not delivering. Too many books; too little time. (Fortunately, my “dnf” list only grows by a few books a year thanks in part to guidance from the GoodReads community). I assign 1 star to “Land of Milk and Honey” because it does prod readers to ponder numerous global problems (media moguls are fond of calling some “existential threats.") But I couldn’t get into this book from the very first pages. The characters seemed like caricatures. The storyline lacked cohesion. The pacing was off. Perhaps it’s me. Maybe I’ve simply grown weary of dystopian dramas.

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