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This is such an annoying book. An ambitious young chef is struggling because Earth has experienced an environmental shift that covered the global skies with smog. This has led to failed crops and ever-reducing food sources. She gets a too good to be true offer from a multi-millionaire who has assembled other millionaires and built his own fiefdom on a mountain that breaks through the smog so that they can grow all sorts of crops, and raise all sorts of animals, etc. The book follows her year in this supposed paradise.

Dear Good-readers, let me list just a few of the annoying features of this book:
- In a "Rebecca" move, the author never tells the reader the name of the protagonist, or even the name of her employer. What's the point of that? You find out the names of other characters, so is the author trying to make these two characters into symbols? Sigh.
- The chef is hired to run a 'restaurant' but it is not really a restaurant - it only serves dinner parties to which various guests of her employer are invited and which have set menus. Yet the chef keeps calling it a 'restaurant'. Don't tell me you are a chef in a restaurant when you are really just a private chef for a rich guy. (There's another reason why this particular chef is hired, but it is just as ludicrous as everything else in this book.)
- How ludicrous you may ask? Well, let's just say that there is huge underground bunker on this mountain in which there live dozens of scientists who are resurrecting extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth so that mammoth meat can be served to the rich guy's guests. Let's consider that one pie served at a dinner party contained 250 live birds who burst into song when the pie was cut open. Let's contemplate that during the trial period of her employment, the chef is required to cook and serve a dozen or more guests at a time with no assistance, and expected to join the dinner table after each course is served, instead of going back to the kitchen to ready the next course, but yet, every course is just perfect - not lukewarm or rushed. A throng of starving children are thrown heirloom apples and instead of delighting in a rare treats, they throw them back at the chef and vomit because their palates have been damaged due to the restricted diet they have been existing on.
- Even the writing is grating. There are SO MANY descriptions of how things taste and feel, but they are all overdone or just lame. Two dogs running across a field sound like the pitter patter of a rainstorm on the roof - OK, maybe if there were a whole lot of dogs, or they were running on a hard surface, but two dogs in a grassy field - cut me a break...

I could go on, but this book is on so many top ten of 2023 lists and has so many rave reviews, that I need to stop complaining and start to try to figure out exactly what I missed. Unless the emperor has no clothes..... hmmmmm.