A review by spinstah
Interstellar MegaChef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

Did not finish book. Stopped at 39%.

The blurb is not doing this book any favors. As it turns out, the cooking competition is not the focus of this novel, and it flits by very quickly. It is grappling with a lot of big concepts like xenophobia and how cultural dominance is expressed in a socialist environment, but so far it doesn’t really seem to be doing much with that other than laying it out. There’s also a lot of technobabble and either very specific descriptors that seem to just be there as a shorthand form of world building and it just wasn’t working for me.