This ended up being not exactly what I expected. Ultimately, just an alright read that I wanted to feel a lot more connected to.

May We Feed the King follows a nameless narrator as she begins curating historical recreations for a palace's 750th anniversary. Along the way, she becomes fixated on an obscure, reluctant king from the palace's history whose precarious reign helps her grapple with and move past a recent trauma. An ambiguous summary to be sure, but I was interested to see what the novel would do with it. I even intentionally left it as the last Booker longlist novel that I needed to read because I was so sure it would be a hit for me. Unfortunately, this didn't end up being the case.

I do tend to love a novel that does a deep dive on a niche occupation or hobby. May We Feed the King starts off this way initially, as our narrator describes the minutiae of her required tasks as a curator (with a particular emphasis on food and dining recreations). But about a quarter of the way in, the narrative shifts entirely, and this shift takes up the bulk of the novel. Whether or not this works for you is going to depend on your own personal tastes; personally, I just wasn't as invested in the book after this point as I wanted to be. I didn't find it to be an effective way of exploring our narrator's psyche, nor did I find it an especially compelling story in its own right. Besides the initial surprise of the deviation (as well as how this portion of the novel plays with perspective), it felt disappointingly predictable and by-the-numbers. And I just couldn't get over my annoyance at being misled by the book's synopsis; but that's my own fault for having any assumptions, given how vague it is.

What I will compliment the novel on is that it doesn't overstay its welcome and is a quick read. The chapters are short and snappy, and the language isn't overly dense or purple despite how central the sensory details are. But this also contributes to a feeling of not being as rooted in the story as you want to be. Everything happens and is moved past so quickly that there's no time to properly sit with anything, and I never got invested as a result.

I think May We Feed the King could easily resonate with the right type of reader. If you go into it with no expectations and don't mind being kept at an emotional distance from a book's characters, this could be a hit for you. But for me, it just didn't scratch the itch I was expecting it to, and I couldn't move past that disappointment.

2.5/5.

An anticlimactic end to my longlist reading, but I'm still glad to have undertaken this project and to have completed it before the announcement of the shortlist next week!