A review by bookishmillennial
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

dark emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced
disclaimer: I don’t really give starred reviews. I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not. Find me here: https://linktr.ee/bookishmillennial

This book follows a nameless Chinese American narrator who is stranded in London and accepts a job in a billionaire's compound, a mountaintop area in Italy which is accessible to sunlight and is populated by extremely wealthy folks who bought their way in. It's an interesting enough premise, though the first half of this book's narrative is incredibly slow-paced, so buckle up!

There were so many topics explored in this (climate change, socioeconomic status, greed, famine), butI do wish the author went just a tiny bit deeper to make more of a commentary on them! Gosh, this is such a bummer for me because this has such incredibly gorgeous and unique prose, and I loved the sensual experience of reading this book (I was *hungry* lol). However, I just don't know that this book distinctly delivered any message or answered any question that it intended to.

I will absolutely read more from C Pam Zhang in the future, because the writing was absolutely stunning! I liked parts of this, and could appreciate the mirrors to our current societal letdowns and mishaps, but this was just fine to me.

Quotations that stood out to me:
“How can I describe my life in the years leading up to this moment except in shades of gray? All the scrape and grind of it, all the empty shelves and lost ambition, all the soot grown hard on windows, season after season the only black harvest. The bad news, the debts, the visa applications, the flesh of your arm humping white between a nurse's fingers as she stuck you with a paltry twelve months' protection against whatever new strain of disease, as if bankruptcy or homelessness or a weariness at aping at the motions of life weren't more likely to kill you first.”

“I refused to be stuck. In Pasaje, California. In the smallness of my mother's life. In a fixed notion of my cooking, my abilities, my worth as ascribed to my Chineseness my Asianness my smallness my womanness my perpetual foreignness--myself.”

“Fear fueled a country so intent on perfection that they would give up the world.”

“We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.”

“What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured.”

“Religion is a flimsy construction of rituals infused with arbitrary power. The gestures have always been empty; behind them stand hustlers no different from you. All that is required is a convincing performance.”

“You believe in a country that does not exist as you imagine it, in a code of morality as fanciful as any creation myth. What do you call that if not blind faith?”

“We shouldn’t be forced to choose at all. The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. Aida, rich as she was, hadn’t been forced to choose between anger and dinner. For the first time in years, I tasted, through her, that feeling.”
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