Opinions of a Wolf

An elderly woman recalls the time in her 20s as a young chef living through a worldwide food shortage.

Summary:
A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Review:
The central conflict in this book is that a young chef on the cusp of her career finds herself suddenly inhabiting a world full of food shortages thanks to smog. Day in, day out instead of cooking the food she wanted to, she’s having to find new ways to use the mung bean powder the government is providing. When an opportunity comes up for a high-paying job working as a chef at a wealthy newly formed, secretive nation-state with the promise of using traditional ingredients, she jumps at the chance. It’s a beautiful set-up for a book.

Another strength of this book is its depiction of Asian-American and Asian-European women. In a book with limited characters, one is Asian-American and one is Asian-European (biracial). These two women love each other and also face racism. One of them from her own father who is white. This book contains one of the most impactful depictions of the harm of exoticizing Asian women I’ve seen.

This is also a sapphic book. The main character has a relationship with another woman for part of the book. It’s not exactly a healthy relationship. It is not explicit. This isn’t a romance novel. It’s a scifi novel with a relationship in it.

What did not work for me was that the tense the story was told in removed all the tension. It’s told in first person past tense. It’s an elderly woman recalling her life, primarily during a great environmental crisis. But because she’s telling the story as an elderly woman, we know she survives everything. Right from the first page. It removed all tension for me.

Also, this is another book where quotation marks aren’t used. What is going on with this trend? It’s not for me. (This one uses italics for everything – whether it’s spoken or thought – making it difficult to understand certain scenes.)

Overall, this is an interesting set-up for a book exploring sustainability and what it is to exist as an Asian woman in a Western society. Recommended to those who are ok with a lack of tension in this type of read.

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3 out of 5 stars

Length: 240 pages – average but on the shorter side

Source: Library

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