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Summary and Reviews of Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Land of Milk and Honey

A Novel

by C Pam Zhang
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  • Critics' Consensus:
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  • First Published:
  • Sep 26, 2023, 240 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Sep 2024, 240 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef's boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.

One

I fled to that country because I would have gone anywhere, done anything, for one last taste of green sharp enough to pierce the caul of my life. I was twenty-nine, a hungry ghost, adrift. I hadn't seen California in ten years, hadn't tasted a strawberry or a leaf of lettuce in three. Hunger was simple, as the rest was not.

Here is the rest: I was an American stranded in England when America's borders closed; I was a cook as that profession lay dying. Both troubles shared one source, namely the smog that spread from a cornfield in Iowa and soon occluded the sun, smothering as it went fields of wheat in Canada and paddies of hard yellow rice in Peru. No more lemon trees fragrant on the slopes of Greece, no more small sweet Indian mangos. Biodiversity fell. Wildlife and livestock perished for lack of feed. Scientists bickered over the smog's composition and politicians over whether pollution or lax carbon taxes or China or nuclear testing or America or Russia were to blame, and ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

  1. C Pam Zhang's Land of Milk and Honey tells a near-future story about a chef who takes a job at a wealthy mountaintop colony, escaping her everyday troubles in a smog-filled world. How does the setting impact your understanding of the characters, their circumstances, and their views of livelihood?
  2. The narrator prepares decadent meals for an enclosed elite community, while the rest of society has a scarcity of money and resources. Compare and contrast between individuals of different class and status. How are various forms of privilege manifested throughout the book?
  3. In the novel, the protagonist makes a difficult career choice, one that is contrary to her mother's wishes. They fundamentally disagree about food, appetite, sustenance, ...

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Land of Milk and Honey is direct in its social commentary, and despite a tragic storyline, it is fiercely optimistic in what it has to say about the nature and future of humanity. Its sharply-written, revelatory moments, appearing as they do between scenes of excess and waste, serve as a reminder that the treasures of the world are unquantifiable and unpredictable, that none of us really know what will bring us joy, what will save us — or humanity. And that, sometimes, what lies on the other side of this lack of knowledge is very, very good...continued

Full Review Members Only (990 words)

(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).

Media Reviews

Chicago Review of Books
Sensuous and sharp in its critique, Land of Milk and Honey delivers a powerful rebuke of how far the privileged will go to retain a level of comfort amid climate catastrophe...A knotty read from start to finish, C Pam Zhang's latest is sure to stay with you for a long time.

Los Angeles Times
The most breathtakingly beautiful dystopian novel since Station Eleven.

New York Times
Dwells with keen intelligence and rich insight at this nexus of food, pleasure, privilege and catastrophe, offering a mouthful of nectar that tastes faintly of blood.

Oprah Daily
Richly lyrical and chillingly propulsive...With sentences as decadent as the meals they describe, C Pam Zhang brilliantly exposes how, in a climate of scarcity, sensuous indulgence always comes with a side of moral complication."

San Francisco Chronicle
Zhang's formidable talents in world-building sparkle…Zhang beholds the world through a lens that's far from despairing. By sprinkling her fiction with smart, speculative touches, she reveals that we as humans can still imagine better, more brilliant outcomes when looking toward the past, present and future. And for Zhang and her readers, taking this route can be fiendishly, deliciously fun.

Kirkus Review (starred review)
[C Pam Zhang] reminds us of what it's like to be embodied and living on Earth with sumptuous scenes of food and sex...Mournful and luscious, [Land of Milk and Honey is] a gothic novel for the twilight of the Anthropocene Era.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Exquisite and seductive...Emotionally captivating and raw, this masterpiece will be enjoyed to the last bite.

Reader Reviews

Gloria M

Powerful Read!
Imagine you are 29 and the world has descended into chaos because of climate change. There is little food, scarce water, no hope for anyone except the wealthy and powerful. Definitely a likely scenario given the current scientific evidence. What ...   Read More

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Beyond the Book



Jian Bing

Jian-bing, which looks like a folded crepeIn C Pam Zhang's Land of Milk and Honey, which takes place in a fictional near-future of worsening climate change and severely reduced biodiversity, the main character chooses to work as an elite chef for a wealthy employer on an isolated mountain in Italy rather than give up access to the ingredients she loves that are rapidly vanishing from mainstream society. However, she experiences doubt about this choice when she takes an uncharacteristic trip into the smog-ridden depths of Milan, where a Chinatown vendor serves her a reimagined version of the beloved street food jian bing (pronounced "JEN-bing"), cobbled together from the scant forms of nourishment still available to people of ordinary means. It reminds the narrator of her childhood ...

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Read-Alikes

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