cozyfitz496 's review for:

Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

4.0

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Escaping her mysterious and troubled past on a ravaged Earth, Saras aims to prove to the galaxy that she is a true culinary great. Unfortunately, her plan to wow everyone on "Interstellar MegaChef", the Iron Chef of the far future, fails spectacularly. But she runs into Serenity Ko, a tech wunderkind basically working on Metaverse simulations, and together they aim to change the nature of food experiences forever. I wouldn't call this a cozy, but it did fill me with warmth. There's queerness, found family, discussions of culture and food, a little romance. But there's also serious and sometimes dark examinations of tech and AI, colonization, empire, and xenophobia. There's so much worldbuilding in the first half of this book that I wondered how we'd possibly wrap up all the facets of the plot that had been introduced. In the last 20 pages I started to panic, hoping they would set us up for a sequel instead of trying to resolve all the loose ends. Thankfully, yes, a sequel appears to be in the works! 450 pages seemed like a lot before I got started, but I'd gladly read a second installment.