Many thanks to NetGalley, Simon and Schuster Canada and Melissa Border for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Milk Fed is “riotously funny and perfectly profane” ( Refinery 29) from “a wild, wicked mind” ( Los Angeles Times). “A ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture” ( Glamour) Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam-by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family-and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey. Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting-until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, through obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. This darkly hilarious and “delicious new novel that ravishes with sex and food” ( The Boston Globe) from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today is a “precise blend of desire, discomfort, spirituality, and existential ache” ( BuzzFeed).

In her wildly readable prose, Melissa Broder ( So Sad Today) has produced one of the strangest and sexiest novels of the new year: a harrowing, exhilarating, and frankly obscene exploration of all the ways we endeavor to make ourselves disappear - and the untold liberty that comes when our appetites are freed at last.Named a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Time, Esquire, BookPage, and more The simple pleasure that Miriam takes in faith and family and the flesh that spills beyond her waistband like so many buttermilk biscuits is a revelation - and an erotic awakening, too. 'All that mattered,' she declares, 'was what I ate, when I ate, and how I ate it.' Until the day she places her usual order (fat-free, no toppings please) at her frozen yogurt spot and is instead served a decadent sundae by Miriam, an Orthodox Jew whose cups runneth over in every way.

talent agency, not her nonexistent social life, and certainly not her neurotic mother, checking in daily from New Jersey. At 24, her life is centered on one objective - not her halfhearted job at an L.A.

If self-denial were a sport, Rachel could host her own Olympics.

Milk fed a novel