What a very beautiful and disturbing book. It is not dystopic in a clichéd sort of way and the writing is poetry. It is memoir (fictional, yes, but memoir all the same). It is speculative fiction. Eunice Wong's reading is perfection, with just the right amount of gravitas with an equanimity that helps us understand. What is sensuous in food and in life becomes ethically blurry when most of the world is overtaken by a smog of debatable origin and the protagonist, a former cook, goes to work for a mysterious employer on a mountain in Italy, above the smog (and above the rules of living below, it would seem). Privilege is redefined and reframed, disguised as innovation.

The imagery and descriptive writing is phenomenal. Zhang is deliberate in linking language across the story: the "calculus of loss" becomes the "connoisseurship of loss"--a subtle juxtaposition spaced several chapters apart, easy to miss. Metaphors abound: "...as I would not serve bitter greens without the consolation of oil, I began to keep back my less palatable feelings..." The insights, too, are plentiful: "Across the years it is hard to make out this version of myself, so blinkered by ambition that she sprinted through thirty years without asking, why?"

It was a slower "read" for me than I anticipated, but there is, forgive me, much to chew upon. ( )

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!

This was more so a long form poem, I found myself struggling to find the plot, but also was swept away by the prose and language of it all. It was beautifully written, but not necessarily something I was craving as an escape at this moment in time. ( )

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. ( )

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.

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. ( )