Everything Rachel does is in service to this brittle little universe she’s built, but one good-sized wind could bring the whole thing crashing down. Every calorie is planned-every meal’s routine, secret and sacred. She works for a talent agency and is white-knuckling through some serious personal issues: mainly, recovery from anorexia, which isn’t going as well as she thinks. Rachel, our narrator, is a deeply unhappy, young Jewish woman living in Los Angeles on the periphery of glitz and glamor. If that feels like a lot, it is… but by the end, we realize that’s kind of the whole point. This book has everything: lesbian sex, mommy issues, eating disorders, frozen yogurt, plus-size golems, Jewish mysticism, weirdly specific fantasies about coworkers, a fat chick as the love interest, and a whole lot more. What a breath of fresh air it was for those accolades to be right! It received a ton of good press ahead of its publication from big-name magazines. In the age of gushing blurbs, it’s hard to know what book, if any, can live up to the hype that precedes it.Ĭolor me pleasantly surprised by Milk Fed, Melissa Broder’s second novel (Scribner, February 2021). I tend to shy away from new books that get a swell of early praise from mainstream sources, and I’m often vindicated in doing so ( American Dirt, anyone?).
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