Bestiary

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Throughout it all, the lyrical serenity of the prose feels at odds with the unflinching violence that it captures—it’s discomfiting. The third-gen daughter grows a tiger tail one day and she must uncover her family's history to understand the source of the tail, and along the way she falls in love. I struggle reviewing this book because I couldn’t get into it and didn’t make it all the way through. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a contemporary bestiary of sorts, the Book of Imaginary Beings, which collects imaginary beasts from bestiaries and fiction. From butterflies that make crocodiles cry and penis-fencing slugs to fish that live inside sea cucumbers' bottoms - the natural world is stranger than you could ever imagine.

With animals holding significance since ancient times, it is fair to say that bestiaries and their contents gave fuel to the context behind the animals, whether real or myth, and their meanings.

Collectively the book shows that the aesthetic encounter, by nature affective, is by nature also interdisciplinary and motivating, and that it spurs the critical in addressing the complex issues of 'humananimality'. Chang also comes from a poetry background and some of her poemy prose felt a little, I don't know, MFA-y to me, such as her penchant for surprising verbs: "buildings toothpicked the sky" "our shadows sharked across the floor" - but YMMV for that style - I did really like it sometimes. The cycle of ingestion and excretion leads to cannibalism, and the story of filial piety involving slicing a piece of your thigh to feed and cure your sick parent (割股, gēgǔ) is actual Chinese history. In fact the bestiary has been expanded beyond the source in the Norman bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc to ninety animals. Finally, there are the ‘aliens on Earth’ – the incredible, the surreal, the magical – such as tardigrades, tongue-eating lice and immortal jellyfish, creatures so astonishing that they make unicorns look rather commonplace.

This lack of separation has often been associated with the assumption that people during this time believed in what the modern period classifies as nonexistent or " imaginary creatures". A worthy heir to Maxine Hong Kingston, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Jamaica Kincaid, K-Ming Chang is a woman warrior for the 21st century—part oracle, part witness, all heart. I always felt as if I were exactly the same distances from events, and that distance was arms-length. Over time, the memorable creatures that were central to the bestiary tradition pervaded the visual vocabulary of the medieval world, becoming some of the most common symbols in art of the period. It is a story that spans three generations of women, vicious and unbreakable cycles and ties of life, death, and everything in between.

While this is a very bold choice, and often used to make the reader feel deeply connected with the protagonist, I felt the overly poetic style of writing clashed with the first person narrative, bringing a disconnect and almost making us feel that the protagonist isn't real. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream r Review: 'Bestiary,' By K-Ming Chang K-Ming Chang's debut novel is full of mythical beasts that roam through the lineage and the stories of a Chinese family in Arkansas, stories that come alive and help them endure pain and trauma. soooo much here to meticulously unravel about family and generational grief and all the ways in which myth is reified. It breaks apart conventions of the English language with abandon and straddles the space between genres.

For example, in one bestiary the eagle is depicted in an illustration and is said to be the “king of birds.Daughter narrates the majority of the book, the contours of her own life weaving in and out of the stories she's heard from other family members. The stories popularized through the bestiary continued to influence natural history texts and images well into the sixteenth century. Thank you to my Goodreads friends whom I polled and was assured by that it was okay to not finish an ARC! NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, The New York Public Library and Kirkus Reviews.