pretty good.

‘Milk Fed’ won’t be a book for everyone... but I absolutely adored it. I read it in one sitting - not stopping to pee or make tea. The dialogue was fresh, in your face bold, smart & savvy. Given that Rachel, our protagonist had an eating disorder, I shouldn’t have liked this book at all.... (our daughter was hospitalized five times battling anorexic) .... so I tend to stay away from the topic today. ( our daughter has been recovered for many years)....But I loved ‘Milk Fed’.... I laughed ... enj...

This hurts a bit. I was so very sure I would love this (The Pisces is one of my all-time favourite books and I had been anticipating Broder’s second novel for what felt like ages) and while Broder’s writing is as sharp as ever and there is much to love, ultimately this did not always work for me. Where Lucy (the main character in The Pisces) is deeply unpleasant and unhappy but so witty and sharp that I could not help but root for her, here the main character, Rachel, is also prickly but before

I want to read everything of Melissa Broder’s that I can get my hands on. So when I got the ARC for this I was beyond excited! It was everything I could have wanted and more and I ended up reading it in less than a day. I love the way she writes, it’s not complicated but it’s raw, honest and self aware . She is one of those writers who write things I think and feel but i haven’t been able to put into words myself or express yet. ‘This absence of rejection felt like an embrace’

Melissa Broder has a sharp, weird sense of humor and a keen eye for the movements of the human soul, but much like in the case of The Pisces (merman sex, remember?), she tends to shoot herself in the foot by relying on some rather stale motifs that juxtapose the fresh language. This new novel tells the story of Rachel, a 24-year-old lapsed Jew with an eating disorder who works at a talent agency in L.A and does stand-up in her free time. All her life, her mother has been suffocating her with her...

/ / / Read more reviews on my blog / / /(heads up: this review contains mentions of eating disorders and body dysmorphia as well as explicit language)2 ½ stars While I doubt that Milk Fed will win many awards, I sure hope that it wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. It 100% deserves to. “Was it real freedom? Unlikely. But my rituals kept me skinny, and if happiness could be relegated to one thing alone, skinniness, then one might say I was, in a way, happy.”Milk Fed follows in the steps of novels

I'm still trying to gather my thoughts on this book. First of all, if you have any sensitivity around eating disorders, this is not the book for you. Just don't do it. The novel starts with Rachel, who has controlled every calorie in her life to where that's all her life is. Her therapist is trying to help her see the connection between this control and the relationship with her mother but she doesn't want to see it.Rachel is also Jewish and befriends Miriam, an Orthodox Jew who works at the fro...

I liked this even more than THE PISCES, which I liked very much. It is going to be another love-it-or-hate-it book, with another protagonist who is a constant cringe-fest, who is deeply damaged, who makes so many terrible choices. Ironically my biggest issue with it is it wraps up many of these issues a little too quickly and easily. Big big big biggest content warnings for disordered eating. Broder goes into extensive detail about Rachel's eating habits and her fears about her body. Content war...

This is painful to write, Milk Fed was one huge disappointment, especially considering I loved Broder's The Pisces. A scathingly funny, wildly erotic, and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex, and god - such misleading claims. I wasn't amused in the least. The sex, which was over-the-top descriptive, was outright off-putting, and there was nothing imaginative, with the exception of a lot of Freudian incestuous masturbatory weird dreaming and fantasizing. The main character and narrator of

Milk Fed just goes to show that you can love a book and still be incredibly disappointed in it. After I read the first 30%, I was convinced that this was going to be my favorite book of the year. Ultimately it did lose a bit of steam and I can't help but to mourn for the exceptional book that it could have been, but nevertheless, I still enjoyed this so much and recommend it wholehearted to the right reader.Milk Fed, Broder's sophomore novel following her sensational debut The Pisces, follows Ra...

3.5 stars, rounded up.Thought-provoking and intense, Melissa Broder's new novel, Milk Fed , is a story of one woman’s obsession with her eating habits, as well as a look at sexuality, religion, and relationships.Rachel has always been fanatical about what she eats. She loves food, but from a young age, her mother ingrained in her a fear of gaining weight and looking fat. Every day is spent longing for delicious delicacies, but she has a regimented meal and exercise plan that she follows obses...

There are some books–very rarely–that I read and form such a personal attachment to that I don’t want to share them with the world. This is one of them. I picked it up based on the fact that it was queer and had a blurb from Carmen Maria Machado; that was about all I knew about it. It turned out to be an immersive, raw, sometimes overwhelming reading experience.Content warning: Discussion of disordered eating, self-loathing, internalized homophobia.The main character struggles with her repressed...

3.0 StarsAdmittedly, romantic contemporary fiction is not my usual genre. However, I picked this one up because I was personally interested in several of the themes explored in the story. I was looking for a cute romance with positive food and body messaging. Unfortunately, that is not the story I got. My favourite part was the main character's progression to food freedom as she slowly gave herself permission to eat. Unfortunately, the restriction described at the beginning of the novel was so a...

I will die for this book.

I just love the quirky and dirty mind of author, Melissa Broder. I absolutely loved her last novel, "The Pisces" and couldn't wait to read "Milk Fed". I actually enjoyed this novel more. It's more accessible, relatable, and tugged at my heartstrings. This novel tackles some heavy subjects like eating disorders, body dysmorphia, religion, bisexuality, and emotional abuse. Rachel is a 24 year-old aspiring stand-up comedienne living in L.A. who struggles with her body/calorie counting/a shallow and...

Milk Fed is a surprisingly tender, affectionate, and heartbreaking examination of maternal abandon, sexuality, and how suffering and desire can pool into one rapturous feeling. I have my opinions of the narrator’s persistent and cringey advances toward her unlikely love interest, as well as said love interest’s responses. For all the sex that transpired in the book, I did not find it very romantic at all because of how the relationship unraveled. Still, I think Broder’s book more poignantly demo...

I really don’t want to compare Milk Fed to The Pisces because how could Broder possibly write another book that speaks to me completely and reveals things about myself I hadn’t known. It felt so deeply personal and revealing and weird and wonderful and I’m yet to have another reading experience like it. Milk Fed is very good and the first half has a very similar vibe to Supper Club which I loved. At the start our protagonist Rachel reduces herself to the saddest consumption and counting of calor...

Think this may be a difficult one for many to swallow, but I couldn’t help devouring — no pun intended. Rachel is far from who I am and yet so much of her felt familiar to me, and in her image I was reminded that to mother yourself is to become your own daughter

OMG! What a book! And what a talent! Melissa Broder is fearless. I guarantee you will not read a funnier or more erotic book this year. Her book 'The Pisces' is one of my all-time favorites (and is being made into a movie!) and I could not wait to see what Ms. Broder would write next.Rachel works at a talent agency in Los Angeles and is plagued by an eating disorder. She carefully controls and plans single every morsel of food and she obsesses over food and eating every waking minute. When and w...

Do you know that meme of the blond girl holding a brunette by her ponytail and tilting a bottle of milk to her mouth? That sums up this novel—in a good way! Reading it felt like little gusts of sugar blooming perfectly underneath your tongue during dessert, and it also felt like a deep-seated desire being met, which are basically the same. Odd, ordinary yet transcendent, full past the brim, this book made me want to be a better daughter to myself.

Somewhere between 3-3.5Whilst I had reservations about some aspects of Broder's fiction debut, The Pisces, it was one of the more memorable reads of of 2018 for me: the protagonist was unique and the content matter nothing like anything I'd read before. So I was eager to check out her highly anticipated new novel, Milk Fed, hoping for a similar vibe. I don't think it's especially fair to compare the two novels directly, but this is a lot more mainstream and accessible in some respects, and I exp...

Melissa Broder's Milk Fed is a quick reflection on how the past can trap us from living in the present.Rachel is a young, Jewish woman living in Los Angeles, working at a talent agency, and structuring her life around a strict and predictable schedule of calories. When she is eventually challenged by her therapist to take a break from her toxic mother in an attempt to confront her eating disorder, Rachel finds herself begin to break out of the restrictive culinary life she had been living. And...

THE WORST audiobook I’ve ever listened to. I’d never expected an author to narrator HER OWN book so AWFULLY BAD! Like, REALLY, REALLY bad! I couldn’t stand her automated reading, her robotic voice. I was like, lady, this is YOUR book that you’re reading, WHAT THE HECK!!!!!Sorry not sorry but I couldn’t stand another 5 hours in her company. Her pathetic narration made everything sound just wrong, like she herself was disgusted with what she had written. Perhaps the book would have worked for me i...

Rachel is a secular Jew, a delicatessen Jew, a free spirit trapped in a prison of dysmorphia. Her mother fiercely controlled Rachel’s calories as a child with a refrain that, “No boy will want you” if she gets chubby. It was extreme and cruel, and now, as a 24 year-old adult trying to make it as a stand-up comic in LA, schlepping through a battle with loneliness and self-imposed strict calorie counting, she spends her days counting the hours between bites, and trying to deflect her intrusive mot...

"Who is that 'out of control' woman you are so afraid of becoming? What does she look like?"Funny, sexy, perverted, and extremely fun to read! I was reminded of Ottessa Moshfegh (whose narrators are arguably much darker, and riskier). But this was still a cathartically enjoyable read, and very funny. Themes include appetite (both food and sexual), mothers, perfection, why L.A. culture sucks, and what "self-care" really means. I also liked the golem thread of the plot. I could have used fewer dre...

CW - dysmorphia, anorexia, body shaming Interesting well paced story about overcoming eating disorder and finding oneself. Lighthearted & quirky storytelling considering the subject. Learned a great deal about Jewish traditions - Golem & Shabbat. Thank you Scribner books for the arc in exchange for an honest review. Full review on Instagram @monikas.bookblog

As expected, I was absolutely blown away by Melissa Broder's ability to write a perfect novel. After adoring THE PISCES a few years ago, I have been itching to read more from her, and MILK FED 100% did not disappoint. This book is a sexually explicit and tender lesbian romance that is also completely wild and hard to put into words. Rachel, the main character, is a young stand up comic in LA who is battling a lifelong eating disorder which started via her mother has a child. As her world begins

Melissa Broder writes stories of needs, not in the conventional sense. Go read The Pisces to see what I mean. In her follow-up, she introduces Rachel, a Jewish woman, more by culture than by religious conviction, that's bisexual, living in Los Angeles, but running from an overbearing mother, an eating disorder, and a subtle loneliness she'll deny. With each turn of the page, we'll read how she stumble, fall, and find her feet again, in search the need of love via mothering of some sort. Like her...

Ok. I’m the first person to review this for GR. Must do the book justice. First thing first, checking the official description, just so I know what can and cannot be discussed without giving away any of the plot, but the official description is surprisingly bare bones. So I can pretty much talk about whatever I want here beyond the basic food, Jews and lesbians. Alrighty then. So meet the protagonist…a 24 year old East Coast transplant to LA, working in the business management end of the enterta...

From the unapologetically dark Melissa Broder, poet and author of the essay collection (and Twitter account) So Sad Today and sexy, splashy fish man romance The Pisces comes this story of eating-disordered lapsed Jew Rachel, whose whole calorie-counting ethos comes crumbling down when she falls in love with the young and deliciously Rubenesque Orthodox woman, Miriam, who pops up one day behind the counter at her favorite fro-yo place. Together Rachel and Miriam feast on hot fudge and whipped cre...