3.5
The Thick and the Lean
ByPublisher 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.
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Thick and the Lean Reviews
3.5
“WOW! wow wow wow.
"We’re taught that the most important thing we can contribute to the world is our beauty, our thinness. This saps our energy, our brain-power, our internal fight. It makes us feel crazy, as if our bodies are enemies, our own minds cannot be trusted. We cannot take on the world for we are too busy battling ourselves.” As a person in eating disorder recovery this brought up SO much for me (I even recommended the book to my dietitian).
What an ingenious concept to switch something that is so taboo to us (sex) and something that’s still so lined with shame (eating, food, etc) ESPECIALLY in this era of society. I ate UP the SeaGate cult experience and how similar it is to our capitalistic/conservative society.
I only wish I could’ve learned more about Beatrice’s life as a young adult. In conclusion: LOVED this.”
“Porter does world building like no other author but this one lacked focus for me. There wasn’t a plot so much as a vague connection between characters. But those characters were all written really well.”
About Chana Porter
Heralded as “the new Philip K. Dick,” Chana Porter is an author, playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and cofounder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls, trans, and nonbinary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and is also the author of The Seep, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her newest novel, The Thick and the Lean, was named Best Science Fiction of 2023 by The Times (London).
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