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 ... Zhang veers unabashedly here into the decadence of language, a surplus of sensory texture and figuration ... There’s an ornateness to this prose that is missing from much contemporary fiction.
Scintillating ... Page after page of decadent, sensual writing ... 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.
The haunting story of an ambitious chef desperate to keep cooking even as 98 percent of the commercial crops fail and the world’s store of food dwindles to gruel ... Zhang is such a cool writer that salmon steaks could stay fresh in her prose for weeks. But there’s something absurd about this narrator’s single-minded obsession with haute cuisine during what sounds like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ... This novel should come with linen napkins ... The story remains tense, unnerving and creepy, but it can feel strangely static. That effect is exacerbated by Zhang’s aphoristic style and the sense that these scenes are being recalled after many decades. Also, the narrator has an aversion to action that places the emphasis on reflection while boiling away moments of real drama. The result is an extremely atmospheric novel about the interplay of environmental destruction and class.
Gloriously lush. Zhang's sensuous style makes us see, smell and, above all, taste the lure of that sun-dappled mountain enclave ... An atmospheric and poetically suspenseful novel about all manner of appetites: for power, food, love, life. At its center is one of the most baroque banquet scenes you'll ever be invited to — one that wickedly tests the pluck of even the most ravenous eaters and readers.
This is a rich novel of ideas, insisting on moral complexity in the end times. It’s also a startling prose hymn to food and sex, love and violence, power and resistance. It is not, in the end, devoid of the optimism without which we have no agency for change.
Zhang’s imagination is as rich as the dishes her narrator prepares. This is a zippy, fresh take on dystopian fiction that Zhang clearly had fun writing. That much is clear from the acknowledgements: a love letter to gastronomy ... As much a parable as a novel about the murky morals of the 0.1 per cent club. Required reading for them and a tasty treat for everyone else.
By imagining the planet stretched to near destruction, Zhang poses complex questions about self-interest. She asks the reader to consider how meaningful individual behavior actually is when the environment continues to decay, regardless of whether one tries to do the right thing ... Zhang’s writing skates between prose and poetry, balancing the haziness of emotion with the grounding of detail. In some instances, the heaviness of her sentences can tip a passage out of balance or make the story harder to follow. But it is deeply refreshing to see plot intentionally cast in a supporting role ... When depicting...tensions, the novel can feel preachy, distracting from Zhang’s otherwise mesmerizing prose ... A bold encouragement to dwell within our desires.
The world’s first gastronomic apocalyptic thriller ... The novel’s eat-the-rich target feels arguably too obvious at times, particularly when we’re being asked to empathise with a protagonist whose biggest concern, in a world devastated by famine, is that she’s lost the ability to experience pleasure. But as a rhapsody of longing for food the novel is a feast ... As a climate thriller, it may not be in the same league as The Road. But it’s odd and original, and makes a compelling case for finding grains of pleasure in a vanishing world.
What might be the most sensuous novel of the year ... Zhang paints a convincing portrait of a central authority who is simultaneously terrifying and irresistible ... The author’s occasional disregard for syntax and headlong rush into feeling will not be to everybody’s taste. But most readers will delight in the alluring world that C. Pam Zhang has confected.
Majestic ... 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.
Ostensibly a work of speculative fiction, but scenarios like these, of course, are no longer strictly speculative—the slow-moving catastrophe of climate change has brought into sharp relief how close we are to the brink ... Even as the narrator herself expresses skepticism toward these indulgences, I found Zhang’s lush, sensuous descriptions of food more transportive than her representation of this so-called future world.
Strange...beautiful ... Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in this novel, but there is outrageous beauty ... Casts the kind of spell that readers can spend a lifetime hungering for. To read this book is to know yourself as a being made of skin and touch, a being made of other bodies. The impact is powerful and immediate. This is an astonishingly accomplished work, a deceptively simple dystopian vision that lays bare the heartbreaking complexities of seeking and giving pleasure, of wanting and loving in a world that is fundamentally shattered and forever shattering anew.
[Zhang's] skills have only increased since she wrote her stunning debut. Mournful and luscious, a gothic novel for the twilight of the Anthropocene Era.
