Member Review
Review by
Owen B, Reviewer
Eating kaijū… and the rich
“Seven Recipes for Revolution” is somehow Ryan Rose’s début and the first in a trilogy (with books 2 and 3 coming out in Summer 2026 and Summer 2027). Quite how this can be the case, I don’t entirely understand, because it’s an excellent YA fantasy, with a compelling, credible setting and an inventive magic system. Essentially, the city is run by an élite who make recipes that grant superpowers, from kaijū meat, in order to maintain their highly socially-stratified society.
To quote the first line, “Before he was Paprick the Butcher, he was Paprick, a butcher”. Our protagonist has a love for the culinary arts, but spends his day working as indentured labour in a factory that harvests meat from Emphons, the local mega-megafauna. He and his underclass friends and family are perpetually on the edge of starvation and live in near-poverty. But one day, after stealing some kaijū meat, a crime punishable by death for the non-élite, he manages to help avert disaster after accidentally creating a new magic recipe — the first in many years — giving him an opportunity he had never dared to dream possible: to train as a Chef.
Thus starts an adventure — and a revolution — which we see narrated from Paprick’s prison cell many years later.
I really enjoyed this book; it was wittily funny and paced well, with twists and discoveries throughout and you have to love a well-written unreliable narrator, even more so one who questions the means and motives of revolution. The seven recipes all sound delicious and give a real sense of how Ranch feels, to combine with the amazing worldbuilding (including linguistic worldbuilding). The class politics felt real and lived, especially in how people relate to food. As another reviewer put it, “this is a world where inequality is violent, where power corrupts, and where even a miracle can be weaponised”. And, as ever, I was really pleased to read something set in a queernorm (and enbynorm) culture and with both disabled and racialised characters present without being there as heavy-handed expository tools.
It is worth bearing in mind that there is some unpleasant content involved — revolutions are never without cost and it’s rare for people to want to overthrow tyranny without the state having committed violence against them, after all. Content notes that I tagged include animal cruelty, body horror, class violence, death of animals, death of family, mob violence, murder, plague, slavery, state violence, torture and war. But none of these is included unnecessarily or without justification. I am unusually sensitive to animal cruelty and found the first few chapters a little hard in that regard, but it pays off well and I'm glad I persevered.
Overall, this is an outstanding début that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys some revolutionary fiction or who likes seeing food centred in their reads (and who won’t struggle with the trigger warnings, of course). I really hope Rose’s previous unpublished novels get some love and attention and I am super excited for the second and third in the trilogy and I look forward to devouring them faster than some stolen Emphon steaks.
Also: Kerby Rosanes’s cover art for the US edition is awesome and really gives a sense of the scale of the kaijū — indeed it’s only when I saw the large version in Ryan Rose’s press kit on my laptop that I even noticed Paprick is stood on top (and looking very cool!)
“Seven Recipes for Revolution” is somehow Ryan Rose’s début and the first in a trilogy (with books 2 and 3 coming out in Summer 2026 and Summer 2027). Quite how this can be the case, I don’t entirely understand, because it’s an excellent YA fantasy, with a compelling, credible setting and an inventive magic system. Essentially, the city is run by an élite who make recipes that grant superpowers, from kaijū meat, in order to maintain their highly socially-stratified society.
To quote the first line, “Before he was Paprick the Butcher, he was Paprick, a butcher”. Our protagonist has a love for the culinary arts, but spends his day working as indentured labour in a factory that harvests meat from Emphons, the local mega-megafauna. He and his underclass friends and family are perpetually on the edge of starvation and live in near-poverty. But one day, after stealing some kaijū meat, a crime punishable by death for the non-élite, he manages to help avert disaster after accidentally creating a new magic recipe — the first in many years — giving him an opportunity he had never dared to dream possible: to train as a Chef.
Thus starts an adventure — and a revolution — which we see narrated from Paprick’s prison cell many years later.
I really enjoyed this book; it was wittily funny and paced well, with twists and discoveries throughout and you have to love a well-written unreliable narrator, even more so one who questions the means and motives of revolution. The seven recipes all sound delicious and give a real sense of how Ranch feels, to combine with the amazing worldbuilding (including linguistic worldbuilding). The class politics felt real and lived, especially in how people relate to food. As another reviewer put it, “this is a world where inequality is violent, where power corrupts, and where even a miracle can be weaponised”. And, as ever, I was really pleased to read something set in a queernorm (and enbynorm) culture and with both disabled and racialised characters present without being there as heavy-handed expository tools.
It is worth bearing in mind that there is some unpleasant content involved — revolutions are never without cost and it’s rare for people to want to overthrow tyranny without the state having committed violence against them, after all. Content notes that I tagged include animal cruelty, body horror, class violence, death of animals, death of family, mob violence, murder, plague, slavery, state violence, torture and war. But none of these is included unnecessarily or without justification. I am unusually sensitive to animal cruelty and found the first few chapters a little hard in that regard, but it pays off well and I'm glad I persevered.
Overall, this is an outstanding début that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys some revolutionary fiction or who likes seeing food centred in their reads (and who won’t struggle with the trigger warnings, of course). I really hope Rose’s previous unpublished novels get some love and attention and I am super excited for the second and third in the trilogy and I look forward to devouring them faster than some stolen Emphon steaks.
Also: Kerby Rosanes’s cover art for the US edition is awesome and really gives a sense of the scale of the kaijū — indeed it’s only when I saw the large version in Ryan Rose’s press kit on my laptop that I even noticed Paprick is stood on top (and looking very cool!)
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