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A review by nmaslibrary
Celestial Banquet by Roselle Lim
2.0
Thank you, NetGalley and Zando Project, for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Celestial Banquet follows a young girl named Cai who enters a cooking competition with a minor god, a nomad, and a friend. The competition is filled with deadly challenges given by the three most powerful gods, who are also the judges.
The premise sounded interesting and fun. The writing was decent, nothing repetitive or clunky. It was also fast-paced and jumped right into the main plot without taking too much time. And while I appreciated its pacing, it also had a downside.
Because of its fast pacing, we're not left to settle with some things that happen, and a lot of things are left unexplored and unexplained. I'm guessing this might be the start of a series, but with how quickly everything was going, it just didn't make sense.
The challenges and competitions weren't properly explored, and I wasn't fully immersed as I would have liked to be. I couldn't feel the high stakes with how quickly everything was going, and it's disappointing because I was looking forward to reading more about the cooking parts.
It's told through a first-person point of view, so we're seeing this through Cai, and she's an okay character, but I couldn't connect with her, and her priorities in the middle of the deadly cooking competition made me side-eye a bit.
For some reason, there's a love triangle. I am the biggest hater of love triangles, but I can tolerate them if they're actually interesting and make sense. Her two love interests, Bo and Seon, are both one-dimensional and caricatures: Bo, the childhood best friend, and Seon, the pretty rich boy that's where both of their characters end. They both have no interesting quality that would make me even want to root for her to end up with either of them.
A lot of the other minor characters fell flat and were uninteresting and forgettable. There's a lot that could have been done that would have elevated the story for me if it had more depth.
Celestial Banquet follows a young girl named Cai who enters a cooking competition with a minor god, a nomad, and a friend. The competition is filled with deadly challenges given by the three most powerful gods, who are also the judges.
The premise sounded interesting and fun. The writing was decent, nothing repetitive or clunky. It was also fast-paced and jumped right into the main plot without taking too much time. And while I appreciated its pacing, it also had a downside.
Because of its fast pacing, we're not left to settle with some things that happen, and a lot of things are left unexplored and unexplained. I'm guessing this might be the start of a series, but with how quickly everything was going, it just didn't make sense.
The challenges and competitions weren't properly explored, and I wasn't fully immersed as I would have liked to be. I couldn't feel the high stakes with how quickly everything was going, and it's disappointing because I was looking forward to reading more about the cooking parts.
It's told through a first-person point of view, so we're seeing this through Cai, and she's an okay character, but I couldn't connect with her, and her priorities in the middle of the deadly cooking competition made me side-eye a bit.
For some reason, there's a love triangle. I am the biggest hater of love triangles, but I can tolerate them if they're actually interesting and make sense. Her two love interests, Bo and Seon, are both one-dimensional and caricatures: Bo, the childhood best friend, and Seon, the pretty rich boy that's where both of their characters end. They both have no interesting quality that would make me even want to root for her to end up with either of them.
A lot of the other minor characters fell flat and were uninteresting and forgettable. There's a lot that could have been done that would have elevated the story for me if it had more depth.