RaveThe New RepublicMajestic ... Fewer than 250 pages but is paced so deliberately that each turn of the plot sneaks up on the reader without feeling abrupt. What helps sustain this gradual buildup of tension is Zhang’s willingness to linger on images of food. Throughout, Zhang braids this book with painterly descriptions ... What makes Land of Milk and Honey especially compelling is how persuasively she renders a future so stratified that only a few, perched at the very top of the material ladder, will retain the right to eat for pleasure as the planet gasps for air.
Yunte Huang
PositiveThe New Yorker[Huang] mostly avoids simplifying her into an easy icon of empowerment or an object of pity ... Huang seems so concerned with meticulously building the world around Wong that his picture of Wong herself starts to dim. As a consequence, Wong feels sometimes less like a flesh-and-blood figure and more like a prop through which Huang conducts his survey of Asian American history ... Daughter of the Dragon has its lapses. But it soars when Huang resists treating Wong as a hapless victim of American history and digs deeper to reveal the shrewd, resilient soul beneath.
Michelle Zauner
PositiveThe AtlanticLikely best known to the public as the singer and guitarist Japanese Breakfast, Zauner spends Crying in H Mart detailing the disorientation that her grief gave rise to, weaving food into her process of mourning. (The book feels particularly, if unintentionally, suited to this period in history, after the past year of accumulated grief.) ... Though it lacks recipes, Crying in H Mart teems with descriptions of food, and one’s mileage may vary with them. Zauner front-loads her book with elaborate memories of consumption that sometimes have a flimsy connection to the narrative spine ... Reading certain passages, I am reminded of the times in my career as a professional food writer when editors have pleaded with me to bring the story back to the food, as Zauner does here. This is the food writer’s dilemma: So often, our implicit job is to make our reader hungry. But fulfilling that brief can easily cause a writer to lose sight of their tale’s focus. As lovely as Zauner’s indulgent sketches of meals are, they slow her momentum ... But agile writers know how to mine food for emotional truth, and Zauner finds her footing as Crying in H Mart progresses. Near the end, she connects food to her own unmooring.
