H. A. Swain

Food all died off. Our characters have food names. Thalia Apple, yes that's her name, takes us through a long and arduous book.

What's it about? It's, uh, about using magical supplements to starve off hunger and poop questions.

I dunno. I guess people don't poop because they act weird about going to the bathroom??? It's a conversation piece, I guess. But not using your stomach or anus means it will atrophy and break down in many ways.

Yes, I spent my reading fixated on the digestive system shriveling and rotting. That was my submersion being severed.

I guess if you don't know a lot about biology you can read this book and get through it without questioning too much, but the thing is is that all these supplements and stuff wouldn't work to feed a human being and have their internals working healthily. The stomach still needs food put in to digest and without that it becomes it needs bacteria introduced to fight off and the blood needs certain things like iron rich food, so this book had me thinking about all of the flaws and impossibilities of this. And it really didn't lean into magic enough so I couldn't just say "oh it's magic bs" and move on.

Another thing is babies need certain bacteria introduced to them by milk and buy other foods in order to have a healthy gut bacteria that can digest things, if there is nothing to digest then people of this generation and the future generations would be born without any digestion abilities and they were get refeeding sickness from it.

I couldn't immerse myself for questioning everything this book offered. It feels like they should have found a couple of editors or even biology majors and asked how well this could work.

Even vegans use animal based supplements to fill in the gap left by not eating animal or animal products. Meaning that there is no perfect animal less diet out there because no matter what we will all need eggs or meat or some kind of supplement and that still requires eating food and it going through the stomach and the body taking the nutrients from that. No matter what, food needs to go in, even if it's just with supplements on the side. I know that they mentioned kudzu a lot but I don't remember them eating it and if they did it's still not enough to go along with the supplements.

1 star. I can't even guess who the target audience is.… (more)