Stated. Drawled. Popped. Three words that I am just about done with when it comes to reading fiction.

I just recently finished Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan, and oh boy did she overuse “popped”. I mean, the whole book is about food, so it makes sense in a way, but I feel like every other page had someone popping something in their mouth. There’s a reason I go through my fiction for The Six Words; I feel like writers these days need to go through and look for the action version of said bookisms. I’m sure Lakshminarayan specifically chose “popped” as often as she did, but I bet if she could do it again she might rewrite a few of those.

The book itself is really cool — it’s an Indian future (as opposed to a Western future like Star Trek) set 2000 years from now — but the cover doesn’t do it justice. I can’t remember donuts being very important to the story, except that at one point Saras makes a fried thing that’s vaguely donutty. Still, how would a cover artist take the assignment for this book, which is about so much more than “Earth girl wants to win cooking competition”, and turn it into something that evokes everything the book does? Sometimes you just have to accept that you’re going to get a donut.

At least I like donuts.