Savor Station is a remote space station best known for The Sol Majestic, the most exclusive restaurant in the universe. People will travel light years to visit, and reservations are made years in advance. But Kenna doesn't know about The Sol Majestic when he arrives. He's a starving teenager, dragged from station to station by his parents, who are attempting to fulfill the Inevitable Philosophies of their religion while haranguing Kenna for not yet coming up with his own Philosophy. Yet by pure dumb luck, Kenna finds himself in the kitchen of The Sol Majestic, falling in love with the work the chefs perform every day and falling in love with one chef in particular, an indentured servant named Benzo. Soon the fate of Kenna's as-yet-unknown Inevitable Philosophy and the grandiose-but-bleeding-money restaurant are intertwined, causing Kenna to doubt the religion of his parents as well as his own humanity.
This book is a love letter to food, to determination, to hardworking labor. In rebelling against his parents' prohibitions against manual labor and mixing with the commoners, Kenna learns about the universe around him as well as about himself. So in that sense, it's a fairly standard coming-of-age tale. But it also delves into the concepts of knowledge, of power, of honesty, of skill, and of time itself. While parts felt a bit slow to me, I ended up loving this book and the way it resolved itself. I'm so glad Ferrett Steinmetz decided to keep writing and created this book.
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