The Bookish Mindset

Overview:

Title: Interstellar Megachef
Author: Lavanya Lakshminarayan
Published: November 2024
Genre: Sci-Fi
Themes: Found family, politics

One sentence summary: Hitch-hikers galaxy meets bake off in an intergalactic adventure, surrounding the politics of food.

One sentence review: A lot of fun to start a duology and I’m excited to see where it goes next.

Review:

After escaping from your home planet, competing in an intergalactic cooking competition to prove to everyone you’ve made it sounds like the logical next step, right? Not so much, but that’s Saras’s plan of course. She couldn’t have predicted what happened next but hey, one step at a time.

So this was a lot of fun! It’s advertised as a mix of bake off and hitch hikers guide to the galaxy and I feel like it’s got that comparison down to a tee.

There’s a lot of lightness in this book and not necessarily because of the narrative, but because of the world that Lakshminarayan has created. It’s easy to consume despite the multiple new worlds and characters that are introduced.

There’s lots of clever ways of weaving colonialism and the politicalness and prejudices of food into this and it’s really well done. I really appreciated the attention to detail in these aspects.

There’s lots that’s left to be cleared up in book two so I’m interested to see where those storylines are taken but I definitely wanted some to be cleared up sooner, I have questions!

Huge thank you to Solaris for the copy of this book, it was so much fun to read ahead of it’s release.

If you’d like to get yourself a copy, you can support local bookshops while doing so on Bookshop.org with this link here.

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And don’t forget to check out my other blogs and reviews – you can find books with similar themes in the same folder link below, or click back onto blogs to see the whole offering.

Last updated 13/11/2024