Some books make you feel something visceral, something physical, something that knots your stomach and prickles your skin in ways you weren’t prepared for. Milk Fed is an experience as much as it is a novel. Melissa Broder takes hunger in all its forms and turns it into something raw, indulgent, and deeply unsettling.

At its core, this book is about obsession. Food, desire, control, religion… every element feels like it’s teetering on the edge of reverence and perversion. The way Broder writes about food is almost erotic, but not in a way that feels comfortable or luxurious. It’s indulgent to the point of grotesque, a slow unraveling of restraint that leaves you feeling complicit in the protagonist’s spiraling desires.

And then there’s the queer awakening, tangled beautifully within Judaism. Watching the protagonist’s relationship with Rachel unfold feels like watching a ritual in itself, a slow and deliberate exploration of touch, taste, and devotion. There’s a kind of reverence in the way queerness is explored here; not as something dramatic or performative, but as something deeply entwined with identity, faith, and hunger.

Milk Fed isn’t a cozy read, by any means. It lingers, it festers, it makes you squirm. And yet, it’s also brilliant. A book that doesn’t shy away from the grotesque beauty of indulgence, whether in love, in food, or in the places where the two blur together. It’s unsettling, but it’s supposed to be. And that’s exactly why it works.