Title: Celestial Banquet
Author: Roselle Lim
Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 320
Publisher: Zando
Review Copy: eARC received from publisher
Availability: Available now
Summary: In Roselle Lim’s YA fantasy debut, a young noodle chef competes in a cutthroat cooking competition for the gods in a vibrant world inspired by Chinese and Southeast Asian folklore.
Once every generation, the Major Gods hold a Celestial Banquet, inviting chefs from all over the Continent to prepare mouthwatering fantastical feasts. The winner is awarded the fabled Peaches of Immortality, along with a lifetime of fame and fortune. The losers perish per the whims of the fickle gods.
Hot-headed noodle chef Cai enters the competition with dreams of owning her own restaurant and supporting her impoverished Peninsula town. Along with the drunken Minor God Kama, her childhood crush-turned-friend Bo, and dreamy noble Seon, Cai must now compete against the Continent’s finest culinary masters in trials that range from hunting and serving up mystical sea serpents to preparing a magical omurice from the eggs of the legendary Jian bird.
Battling impossible odds and inconvenient feelings for both Bo and Seon, Cai is determined to prepare a feast fit for the gods—even if she loses her life. In this spectacular debut YA fantasy, Iron Chef meets The Hunger Games in a high-stakes cooking competition for the gods.
Review: [Note: While there is some body horror in this book, due to some terrible cooking accidents, the book doesn’t linger on the moments. ]
I love deadly competitions in my media, so Celestial Banquet caught my eye immediately. When author Roselle Lim focuses on the competition, Celestial Banquet really shines. The descriptions of how Cai made all of the food were always interesting, and Lim gave enough detail I felt like I could envision what Cai was doing even if I wasn’t familiar with some of the mundane ingredients. Cai’s ingenuity during the competition made her a fantastic underdog competitor, and each round felt like a genuine struggle and well-deserved placement. I was always impressed by Cai’s clever solutions and determination to fulfill her and her father’s dream.
There is a lot more going on in this book than the competition, and several of these plot threads do not have enough room to breathe. This largely impacts the characters—everyone except Cai and Kama did not have enough pages dedicated to them to become fully fleshed out. There were two different political subplots that I very much wanted the book to explore that didn’t get much screen time at all. We also hardly got to know anyone from the other teams (except toward the end), which meant that the casualties along the way didn’t have significant emotional impact.
I also did not enjoy the love triangle. There truly wasn’t space for Bo or Seon to get enough depth that I could favor one or the other. And their repeated pushing to make Cai choose between them was frustrating. I was with Cai on this—she’s in the middle of a deadly competition, can we shelve the romance, please? By the end, I was so annoyed, I wanted Cai to cut them both loose so she could focus.
That said, there are very solid scenes and fascinating pieces of worldbuilding in here that I think the book is still worth sticking on your TBR list if the premise speaks to you. The gods Cai cooked for where entertainingly horrifying and unsettling, and they really upped the stakes with their trials and curses. I would have loved even more complicated trials or a longer competition overall, honestly. I’m certainly interested in checking out future works by Lim.
Recommendation: Borrow it someday, if deadly magical cooking competitions are your thing. Celestial Banquet has an interesting premise that gets watered down by too many complications in the allotted pages. The best parts of the book center on Cai’s deadly cooking competition and her ingenuity. The love triangle, unfortunately, is its weakest plot thread.