Name: Land of Milk and Honey
Rating: 3.25 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9781804945292

C Pam Zhang

Land of Milk and Honey

Nadine MacDonald

I’m so disappointed in this book. Such a unique premise that I was SO excited for and it ended up being such a letdown. It’s like the author took a syllabus to every third word as an attempt at sounding poetic. The unnamed protagonist’s only close relationship develops out of thin air without much motivation. The remaining characters fall flat with no meaningful connection to the protagonist or to each other. For just having read a novel that follows a chef during a food crisis, I feel I am suffering a serious food-imagery deficiency. I was hoping for sensory detail and got, at best, some brief and vague descriptions of rare meats. My favourite line in the book comes from the first chapter and had little to do with the rest of the plot: “Red: that color of desire. I began again and said the whole prayer, Our Father through daily bread. Not my words. They belonged to a pastry chef I'd loved, a lapsed Catholic who rediscovered his faith each morning as he fingered the day's shipment of fruit, and forgot it anew each afternoon as we fucked among the butter and jam.” If there’s any reason to read this book it’s for the few sentences like that.

If I could only use one word to describe The Land of Milk and Honey, it would be delicious. Every sentence of this book is a work of art. I failed to highlight anything because every single line was worthy of study. I found the environmentally catastrophic circumstances entirely realistic, and I was infatuated with the love story. An absolutely delectable read full of pleasures. 

Land of Milk and Honey

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