Reviews with content warning for Self harm - Mleko i głód

Thanks to @librofm for the ALC.

I listened to Milk Fed on audio and it took me a while to get through it because it is not like anything I've ever read before. The best way to describe is that it is an experience. a very weird one.

I still don't know exactly how I feel after reading it. I can't say with certainty if I liked it but I'm not sure if I hated it either. The writing was graphic and packed a punch. There were times that I laughed out loud and others where I cringed and wanted to run away. I questioned if this was real life or if it was a psychedelic dream during several points in the story. The super descriptive details about food, consumption and purging were horrifying sometimes. There were plot points that felt so emotionally real, I wanted to put a call in to the protagonist's therapist.

In essence this was a book about the different types of hunger you encounter in the human experience:
🍨 Hunger for human connection
🍩 Hunger for spiritual connection
🎂 Hunger for identity
🧁 Hunger for intimacy and sexuality
🥧 Hunger for maternal love and acceptance

WARNING: If you have any issues with food or eating disorders stay far away from this one. If you want to experience a wild ride that will leave you confused, check this one out.

Bookdragon rating 🔥🔥🔥🔥

#MilkFed #MelissaBroder #reading #bookstagram #audiobooks #ALC #Bibliophile #bookworm #bookish
#bookishmug #booksandflowers #shelfie #bookphotos #booklover #bookdragonreviews #bookfeature #listeningIsReading #BooksofIG #eatingdisorder #bookactivity #booksbooksbooks #bookaddict
#librofm

Content Warnings

literarycherub's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Melissa Broder isn’t for everyone, but she is definitely for me. I devoured her previous books and was excited to get a review copy for Milk Fed. Broder knows how to write about such difficult topics while staying sexy, comical, and thought-provoking. This novel is filled with food, sex, and religion.

“Did anyone genuinely like anything? Most art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren’t on Twitter.”

Please stop here if you get triggered with eating disorders. We follow Rachel, who we are instantly shown to have a bad relationship with food and her mother. She has a daily ritual at a fro-yo shop where she fills her cup just to the brim with plain yogurt. One day, a new girl at the shop assists her and convinces her to get toppings, causing Rachel to binge and become obsessed with the new girl’s lifestyle. Rachel is hungry to find motherly love since her own mother has never shown her the unconditional love she seeks.

“Maybe that’s all that prayer was anyway—a cosmic google. In that case, any iPhone could be a synagogue.”

I loved the bisexuality representation and I always relate to Broder’s writing having spent the majority of my twenties living in Los Angeles. The dating culture Melissa writes isn’t that unrealistic. If you are a fan of Ottessa Moshfegh or Daisy Buchanan, then you will love Milk Fed!

Thank you to Bloomsbury Circus and Netgalley for the arc! This title was released March 4, 2021.

Content Warnings

positive_sci_fology's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

mezzarella's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Milk fed is a novel unmatched in its honesty, wit, and realism. This was my first book by Melissa Broder, whose words left me hungry for another story of Milk fed's literary level and uncompromising matter-of-factness. The story centers around a 24 year old woman who has replaced Judaism with the compulsive religion of remaining underfed. Rachel struggles with the relationship she has with her mother and decides to set boundaries after prompting from her therapist. At her core, Rachel is unhappy both with her body and purpose. When she is challenged by the voluptuous and cheerful Miriam, Rachel begins to allow herself to give into her spiritual and literal cravings. A light take on the enemies to lovers trope and an even greater take on literary fiction, this story revels in character's faults and weaknesses.

As a person who has had a complicated past with family and body issues, Rachel's story was incredibly compelling and real. Her neurosis surrounding rituals around food was raw and relatable to me as a reader. I had also dealt with the crises that comes with having more than the average amount of food in front of my plate, or determining how many granola bars I could ration before others began to notice. The shame Rachel has for her body and also her disorder was fascinating to read as they clearly fed off each other. And at the center of unlearning and learning the shame of over and under eating was Rachel's clear hunger for Miriam. Rachel's sexual desires are masterfully paralleled with her real sense of hunger. Where Rachel is underfed and critical, Miriam is fat and positively minded. These two personalities clash beautifully with each other in their differences, not only in food and body image, but also their Jewish beliefs.

Content Warnings

valleybookmama's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny reflective

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner Books for the advance copy!

Rachel is a twenty-something working in Los Angeles, adjacent to the entertainment industry by day and a stand up comedian by night. Her fraught relationship with her controlling mother and her long struggle with body image and disordered eating have consumed her life for many years, but have also allowed her to control and limit the scope of her life in ways that are comforting to her.

Her therapist suggests she “detox” from her mother and cut all communication for ninety days, which sets into motion a series of events, including meeting Miriam, the Orthodox Jewish women who makes her low-calorie frozen yogurt and whose fat body fascinates Rachel and turns her on. Being out from under her mother’s control and her relationship with Miriam, who takes joy in eating, Rachel starts to let herself enjoy indulging in food. Her relationship with Miriam develops as well, as Rachel’s attraction to her is reciprocated. Judaism and the different experiences that Rachel and Miriam have had as Reform and Orthodox, respectively, are central to the narrative, which is refreshing.

Honestly, I’m still thinking about this book and turning it over in my head. What it says about women and food, about bodies, about our relationships with our mothers and all the ways they can damage us when we just want to be fed. Milk Fed made me deeply uncomfortable at many points. Once she’s not longer being controlled by her mother, Rachel is set free to explore her sexuality and live inside her body, and she sure does. This book is explicit and graphic in many ways, about sexuality, about bodies, about disordered eating, and you’re inside the head of someone whose ideas about themselves are so caught up in her relationship with her mother, it’s hard for it not to take a real Freudian turn. But at its core, this is a story about hunger—hunger for food, freedom, love, belonging, themes that are universal. It’s funny, difficult, sexy, uncomfortable, sad, and introspective all at once. I don’t think this is for everyone, but it’s a thoughtful, quirky little book that I think will sit with you for a while.

Content Warnings

papercraftalex's review against another edition

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emotional funny reflective medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I'm going to be honest, I don't completely know how to rate this book. It's much more of a freudian character study than the romance I thought it would be. Certain parts of it were so disturbing but I couldn't put the book down; it was like watching a car accident. The writing was so well done and there were quotes that truly radiate through, but the plot was just lackluster, especially the ending. It falls into the "no happy endings for queer/mentally ill people" trope as well as a weirdly incestual mother fantasy and penis envy that makes Freud smile up at us. I wouldn't read this again but I truly don't know if I enjoyed it or not.

Content Warnings

caseythereader's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad fast-paced

4.25

Thanks to Scribner Books for the free advance copy of this book.

📚 Whew, this is one of those books that's hard to read and yet impossible to put down.
📚 I feel like I could spend forever unpacking the many layers of power and control and submission in this book and all the ways we encounter those forces - food, family, sex, religion, and more.
📚 Okay, I really thought I could write a coherent review for this book but I can't. It's strange and wonderful, dreamlike and horribly realistic, beautiful and gross, comforting and terrifying. I can't wait to read more of Broder's work.
•
Content warnings: biphobia, body shaming, eating disorder, emotional abuse, fatphobia, homophobia, religious bigotry, and self harm.

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