The Thick and the Lean
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In Lambda Award finalist Chana Porter’s “decadent and richly imagined” (Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine) novel, an aspiring chef, a cyberthief, and a kitchen maid each break free of a society that wants to constrain them.
In the quaint religious town of Seagate, abstaining from food brings one closer to God.
But Beatirc Bolano is hungry. She craves the forbidden: butter, flambé, marzipan. As Seagate takes increasingly extreme measures to regulate every calorie its citizens consume, Beatrice must make a choice: give up her passion for cooking or leave the only community she has known.
Elsewhere, Reiko Rimando has left her modest roots for a college tech scholarship in the big city. A flawless student, she is set up for success…until her school pulls her funding, leaving her to face either a mountain of debt or a humiliating return home. But Reiko is done being at the mercy of the system. She forges a third path—outside the law.
With the guidance of a mysterious cookbook written by a kitchen maid centuries ago, Beatrice and Reiko each grasp for a life of freedom—something more easily imagined than achieved in a world dominated by catastrophic corporate greed.
A startling fable of the entwined perils of capitalism, body politics, and the stigmas women face for appetites of every kind, Chana Porter’s profound new novel explores the reclamation of pleasure as a revolutionary act.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Porter (The Seep) uses exquisite dystopian worldbuilding to critique the Western obsession with controlling women's bodies in this powerful sci-fi fable. Reiko Rimando hopes to escape the poverty of the often flooded Bastian region with a scholarship to study artistic tech in the Middle, and even harbors secret aspirations of a rarified life of wealth living in the sky of the Above—but then her funding is pulled, and she instead turns to cybercrime and artifice to scam the rich. Meanwhile, Beatrice Bolano escapes the extremist religious community of Seagate where hunger is holy and eating only the minimum to survive puts citizens "closer to angels than animals" but casual public sex starting at puberty is nearly a cultural requirement, in pursuit of her dream of becoming a chef. Though at a distance from one another for most of the novel, Reiko and Beatrice are linked by their discovery and love of the same secret thousand-year-old book: humble kitchen maid Ijo's cookbook-memoir. Porter's sensual descriptions of even the simplest foods, inspired foraging, and creative cookery will resonate with those who love foodie fiction, while her visceral and blatant expressions of body, racial, and class stigma and fetishism give her allegory a heavy punch. This is sure to impress.