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i'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.

but i liked this about the same as i would if it were in that genre, so. fair enough.

this is just not my type of book (no more pandemicish dystopian, please, i'm too fragile) nor of writing style.

more frankly, this is overwritten, with words used for how they sound rather than what they mean. "hulkings," as a synonym for hills. "humping" instead of rising. "eloquent" for an image of a graffitied d*ck. i didn't like it when cormac mccarthy did it, and he did it a lot better.

beyond that, between piles of adjectives, this landed heavily on cliches: "it wasn't until i hung up that i realized he'd never asked my name." no way! really?

add to these its gimmicks: "my employer" unwieldily used as many as four times a paragraph, as what was a fun style choice in early pages loses its sheen by the halfway point. if only there were a short, one or two syllable thing that we could call a specific person in order to reference them.

there are haystacks of em dashes every time another language is used, in an italy surrounded by expats as our monolingual protagonist.

there's italicized dialogue instead of the proletariat quotation mark.

in other words...a lot of unearned style here.

and ultimately my interest in the idea of an illicit, hyper-gifted chef cooking in secret in a dystopian world without food died when met with an untalented line cook. that, and a nonsense plot hinging on the justification-less idea that she'd be portraying a woman of another nationality at least decades her senior. 

not to mention that goofy ending.

anyway. this book doesn't know what it wants: for us to condemn its cast of wealthy, even as they do more than the politicians it can't bring itself to frame as the good guys; to extol the virtues of our protagonist, deliberately ignorant to the selfishness and ego and greed that rival anyone's; to approve of fine cuisine or skewer it, same with capitalism and global travel and age- and power-gap relationships and money and philanthropy and and and.

it's mealy mouthed in every way you can imagine, and it leaves a sour taste.

bottom line: not yummy.

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tbr review

i just like reading about food