Delicious Foods

A great story. Nicely paced read. A challenging exercise in narration. Overall, a good book with an important story.

This book is a grind to read, one that in some ways parallels the lives of its characters: a mother who stumbles from her own tragedy into a life of drug addiction, and then falls captive of an exploitative agricultural business that separates her from her son; and that son who is desperate to find his mother despite her faults, and in that finding is delivered his own physical tragedy.The narration doubles-down on the intensity of this story, as a key narrator is the drugs themselves--similar in innovation to The Book Thief's "Death" narrator, but much more haphazard in dialect and discipline. And the book stretches out in its middle parts in trying to convey what life is like working at Delicious Foods, for both the mother and son, in a way that is difficult to swallow.But the ending, wow. Not only is there a meaningful narrative shift that deepens the reading, but the skill of prose that had been in some way obscured by the "drug narration" is clarified into some harsh, penetrating truths about the human experience. I struggled through a lot of this book, but the final chapters were some of the best written I've come across in some time.It is a struggle to get there, but the ending is worth it.

Delicious Foods begins with Eddie, a young man with freshly severed hands, frantically trying to steer a stolen car from Louisiana to Minnesota. It's a gripping first chapter that sets the stage for the rest of the novel. What exactly is Eddie escaping? How did he lose his hands?From there, we step back quite a bit to see what led Eddie to this situation. We learn that his father died horrifically when Eddie was six years old. His mother Darlene, devastated by the loss of her beloved husband, turned to crack to cope with her grief and trauma. One day, when Eddie was still a child, Darlene disappeared. It turns out she had been lured away with the promise of a good job at a mysterious, nefarious company called Delicious Foods that essentially enslaves black employees, trapping them at the facility to conduct strenuous manual labor in exchange for drugs.Delicious Foods is a southern gothic cultural satire with a distinctly surreal bent to it, and there are a lot of compelling metaphors at play: while modern slavery and unfair labor practices—particularly in the food industry—are current realities, Delicious Foods is just as much a commentary on pre-Civil War chattel slavery and the deep legacy of racial injustice in America. Hannaham's characters are bombarded with modern examples of systemic racism, and these struggles often drive them to desperation.Perhaps the most brilliant thing about this book is that Darlene's chapters are actually narrated by crack cocaine (nicknamed Scotty). It's a strange narrative device, but it totally works—and it really drives home the hold that drug addiction has over people's humanity.As much as I loved Hannaham's ideas and the ingenuity of his narrative approach, I struggled with the pacing of this book. I'm not sure it had to be as long as it was. And as interested as I was in the story, there were few scenes that gripped me quite like the opening.I read this for a book club, and I'm glad I did. There's certainly a lot to discuss about slave labor, systemic racism, addiction, familial loyalty, freedom and forgiveness.

You have to have a certain intestinal fortitude for unpleasant events and difficult truths to appreciate James Hannaham's "Delicious Foods". You will be glad you stepped out of your comfort zone to experience the world he has created. Mr. Hannaham's writing flows seamlessly, even as events change from the perspective of the characters. To pay his writing the highest compliment I can think of, reading "Delicious Foods" was like reading an essay by the best writers from the New Yorker magazine. Rather than read like a fiction novel, it reads more like a true story that follows the events in someone's life. The true horror is that you expect that events like this have certainly transpired throughout history and Mr. Hannaham brings them vividly to life. There are also times in his narrative when switching characters, that the transformation is so real, so tangible that it can be absolutely heartbreaking, as when Eddie the six-year-old is experiencing the feelings after the death of his father. I don't recall anyone ever capturing the perspective of a young person - who doesn't have that perspective at that age - in such a realistic and horrible situation. Delicious Foods is an amazing work of tragic poetry. Mr. Hannaham invites you in and takes you on a trip you won't soon forget. As an educator, if I could I would make it required reading in not only every high school English class, but in History as well.

Excellent condition

The « Delicious Foods » of this novel is a company out of hell and its workers are living a nightmare at the hands of a ruthless boss and a sadistic foreman.Thanks to James Hannaham’s terrific writing this novel is a tour de force : a story about racial injustice, about people who have reached rock bottom and whose only solace is drugs, about a woman who can’t get over the murder of her activist husband and her son who tries to save her, about people who have given up all hope and are resigned to live as slaves and those that are willing to fight for their freedom

This starts shockingly and continues to unravel the sad trail of events that drag people with nothing even further down. The joy comes with an unlikely child and the next generation.

Je ne savais pas que c'etait en anglais , puis je l'echanger contre une version en français ?