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Bestiary
Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family's queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets.
One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth–and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.
With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.
One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth–and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.
With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.
259 pages, Hardcover
First published September 29, 2020
575 people are currently reading
20611 people want to read
About the author
K-Ming Chang
12 books664 followersK-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her short story collection, GODS OF WANT, is forthcoming from One World.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 997 reviews
March 14, 2025
books about the violence of womanhood <3
the creepy crawly gross surreal way that three generations of mothers and daughters are haunted by generations of violence and gendered expectation...how it's presented through entwined mythology and magic...the cruelty and the forgiveness and the anger and the love it shows without ever ever directly telling...
why does this book have a 3.44 average rating??
besides the egregious grossness, i suppose.
bottom line: this is why i can't stop reading low-rated books.
the creepy crawly gross surreal way that three generations of mothers and daughters are haunted by generations of violence and gendered expectation...how it's presented through entwined mythology and magic...the cruelty and the forgiveness and the anger and the love it shows without ever ever directly telling...
why does this book have a 3.44 average rating??
besides the egregious grossness, i suppose.
bottom line: this is why i can't stop reading low-rated books.
Read
September 21, 2020Ahhhh, the book is coming out soon!!! So, so terrified. Here are some excerpts from my interview with One World about the book!
Bestiary is part coming-of-age and part mythological retelling (and part family saga??) I sometimes call it “speculative history” because it reimagines the past, and in doing so, attempts to redefine the future and all its possibilities. It explores three generations of a matriarchal Taiwanese-American family and their migrations and inherited traumas – it also attempts to subvert the static idea of a canonical “history” by allowing the women in the family to embody their stories. I wanted to understand how trauma and history could be alchemized or told slant through mythology. The book is propelled by the mystery of a daughter who grows a tiger tail, linking her to the myth of a carnivorous tiger spirit in a human body, who loves eating children's toes and calling them "peanuts" (a story that my mother told me growing up and that I found equal parts funny and tragic). She is then forced to examine her family’s buried (literally and figuratively) past/present.
I wanted to write a story about queerness not as a source of pain but as something that saves her life. Daughter must decide whether she wants to perpetuate the violence in her family or subvert it into something else, and innovation/invention is her form of survival. Because she’s a queer girl, she has to make her own myths and define her own belonging.
Writing poetry has given me permission to be both reverent and irreverent toward language. Poetry presents so many possibilities and ways of redefining form and narrative. I wanted to bring a similar playful energy, and in the novel, I tried experimenting with form by incorporating footnotes, vignettes, and oral histories, creating a queer and matriarchal story in which the narrator doesn’t necessarily need to look to the “outside” world for what’s possible – rather, she grapples with what she’s inherited, deciding what lineages she wants to be a part of. I hope that it’s in conversation with other works and that it helps create a new language for queer migration stories, and that it feels playful, subversive, and reparative.
This book has been transformative for me to write: it allowed me to alchemize historical loss, and create radical transformations and resurrections on the page.
Bestiary is part coming-of-age and part mythological retelling (and part family saga??) I sometimes call it “speculative history” because it reimagines the past, and in doing so, attempts to redefine the future and all its possibilities. It explores three generations of a matriarchal Taiwanese-American family and their migrations and inherited traumas – it also attempts to subvert the static idea of a canonical “history” by allowing the women in the family to embody their stories. I wanted to understand how trauma and history could be alchemized or told slant through mythology. The book is propelled by the mystery of a daughter who grows a tiger tail, linking her to the myth of a carnivorous tiger spirit in a human body, who loves eating children's toes and calling them "peanuts" (a story that my mother told me growing up and that I found equal parts funny and tragic). She is then forced to examine her family’s buried (literally and figuratively) past/present.
I wanted to write a story about queerness not as a source of pain but as something that saves her life. Daughter must decide whether she wants to perpetuate the violence in her family or subvert it into something else, and innovation/invention is her form of survival. Because she’s a queer girl, she has to make her own myths and define her own belonging.
Writing poetry has given me permission to be both reverent and irreverent toward language. Poetry presents so many possibilities and ways of redefining form and narrative. I wanted to bring a similar playful energy, and in the novel, I tried experimenting with form by incorporating footnotes, vignettes, and oral histories, creating a queer and matriarchal story in which the narrator doesn’t necessarily need to look to the “outside” world for what’s possible – rather, she grapples with what she’s inherited, deciding what lineages she wants to be a part of. I hope that it’s in conversation with other works and that it helps create a new language for queer migration stories, and that it feels playful, subversive, and reparative.
This book has been transformative for me to write: it allowed me to alchemize historical loss, and create radical transformations and resurrections on the page.
Read
March 10, 2021Content warnings: cannibalism, animal abuse, animal killing, child abuse, miscarriage, suicide, blood, poison, gore, bestiality, PTSD, gun shot, on-page amputation
Throughout most of the read, I thought the gruesome imageries were the author’s attempt to make Bestiary a disturbing read. But when I was two-thirds in, I realized this isn’t just a Taiwanese American novel, but also a retelling of Tayal fables (Tayal are a Taiwanese indigenous people, 泰雅族), strung together with common themes, told in English but are really also in Chinese (mostly Mandarin, but Taiwanese sort of helps).
So I continued my reading as my eyes trailed the lines of English, my thoughts flipped to Mandarin and all the Tayal folklore I remembered and could find.
Then things started to make sense.
I still don’t understand most of the book, but I now see the intricacies Chang put between the lines, and it isn’t just the internal rhyming and play-on-words in English (e.g. daughter/slaughter), but more, far more. As a Taiwanese, I thought I’d easily get the references but I didn’t. I had thought long and hard before things slowly clicked into place, and I am writing down these details so you don’t have to fry your brain like I did mine. But then again, most of these are not mentioned in Bestiary and are merely my theories.
In Tayal legends, there are four types of animals, the beasts, the humans, the snakes, and the birds. Throughout Bestiary, we see the cycle of consumption, the never-ending loop of deaths and rebirths, of ingesting excretions and excreting ingestions. The scenes and events are downright crude and revolting. Beasts, like tigers, like Hu Gu Po (虎姑婆) from Taiwanese folklore, are predators, eating and hunting for children’s toes as peanuts, which sounds like penis, and therefore leads to bodily fluids, excretions of humans. There is Ben (does it sound like root/本/běn?) with her shadow bird, and women who are snakes (白蛇精, literally “white snake demon”). The main animals were indeed tigers, humans, snakes, and birds (mainly geese). I originally thought the animals were all references to Zodiac signs, but goose isn’t one.
Excretions. Saliva (口水, kǒushǔi) is literally mouth water in Mandarin, and the mouth, the 口, is repeatedly mentioned in the story as a hole. And semen (精液, jīngyì), which, if we were to create a word for “whale liquid” would sound exactly the same. Hence the whales in the story, I think. Water, rain, sea, salt, sweat is one general theme. And the sky, the bruising sky, which meant the blue sky because bruise in Taiwanese is black-blue (烏青, oo-tshenn) and bruise-blue (瘀青, yūchīng) in Mandarin. The same character for blue (青, chīng) can be combined with the character fo sky (天, tiān) to mean sky (青天, chīngtiān) and so the sky is blue. The (controversial) national flag of Taiwan is described as “blue sky, white sun, red ground everywhere” (青天白日滿地紅). Red like blood, and white as in White Terror (see Taiwanese history of martial law period from 1949 to 1987), white snakes, and a hint of racism in the US. There are also political elements of the animosity between Taiwanese and Chinese. And why were there crabs in Bestiary? My theory is that crab (蟹, xiè) sounds exactly like flood and excretion (洩/瀉), and therefore water again, and the gruesomeness of piss and shit everywhere in the story.
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. So not only do we have cannibalism here, we also have the complex relationship between children and parents. In The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars (二十四孝), there is also tasting one’s parent’s feces to determine whether or not they are sick. Ingestion of excretion. Also, are you you when you were born from your (biological) parents’ flesh?
The Tayals believe that there once were two suns, and their warriors carried babies who grew up to be the men who tried to shoot down one sun. An arrow struck one of the suns and it bled lava. When it died, its corpse became the moon. And from this fable, we have the image of the sun and the moon, the living and the dead, a cycle that repeats itself, opposites with the same roots, and blood and that everything is alive.
According to the Seediq (賽德克族), a tribe of the Tayals, a god and a goddess (or were they siblings?) from a half-petrified tree trunk (note the polarity: half-living and half-dead of a tree) sired many children. Back then, cooking a tiny piece of a grain would produce a full pot of porridge, boiling a boar’s hair meant having a full pot of boar’s meat. How the parts breed wholes, like planting a seed and growing what you planted. I suppose this is what Chang meant, when in Bestiary, they wanted to plant human body parts in holes and water to grow people.
And then the contrasting ideas of whole and hole. There are a lot of holes in Bestiary—holes on human bodies, in bone marrows (like spine which is like rivers and the Great Walls of China), in the ground. Are they holes or are they what make things whole?
Writing this review and analysis makes my head feel like it’s exploding and spinning. The whole book is written with wordplay—wordplays between Mandarin and English, in-between English, in-between Mandarin, beyond languages and tongues, and based on Tayal folklore and the cycle of life and death, of consumption and creation. Note that I haven’t mentioned the queer elements in Bestiary. The characters are casually queer, with sapphic and achillean characters alike, and brief comments on countless genders and non-gendered pronouns in spoken Mandarin. I feel like queerness isn’t the main point of the book.
Bestiary is not an easy read. It is repulsive, mystic, and densely packed. It is a story that spans three generations of women, vicious and unbreakable cycles and ties of life, death, and everything in between.
Buddy read with Kes! Check out their review on Instagram here!
Throughout most of the read, I thought the gruesome imageries were the author’s attempt to make Bestiary a disturbing read. But when I was two-thirds in, I realized this isn’t just a Taiwanese American novel, but also a retelling of Tayal fables (Tayal are a Taiwanese indigenous people, 泰雅族), strung together with common themes, told in English but are really also in Chinese (mostly Mandarin, but Taiwanese sort of helps).
So I continued my reading as my eyes trailed the lines of English, my thoughts flipped to Mandarin and all the Tayal folklore I remembered and could find.
Then things started to make sense.
I still don’t understand most of the book, but I now see the intricacies Chang put between the lines, and it isn’t just the internal rhyming and play-on-words in English (e.g. daughter/slaughter), but more, far more. As a Taiwanese, I thought I’d easily get the references but I didn’t. I had thought long and hard before things slowly clicked into place, and I am writing down these details so you don’t have to fry your brain like I did mine. But then again, most of these are not mentioned in Bestiary and are merely my theories.
My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you’re in.
In Tayal legends, there are four types of animals, the beasts, the humans, the snakes, and the birds. Throughout Bestiary, we see the cycle of consumption, the never-ending loop of deaths and rebirths, of ingesting excretions and excreting ingestions. The scenes and events are downright crude and revolting. Beasts, like tigers, like Hu Gu Po (虎姑婆) from Taiwanese folklore, are predators, eating and hunting for children’s toes as peanuts, which sounds like penis, and therefore leads to bodily fluids, excretions of humans. There is Ben (does it sound like root/本/běn?) with her shadow bird, and women who are snakes (白蛇精, literally “white snake demon”). The main animals were indeed tigers, humans, snakes, and birds (mainly geese). I originally thought the animals were all references to Zodiac signs, but goose isn’t one.
Excretions. Saliva (口水, kǒushǔi) is literally mouth water in Mandarin, and the mouth, the 口, is repeatedly mentioned in the story as a hole. And semen (精液, jīngyì), which, if we were to create a word for “whale liquid” would sound exactly the same. Hence the whales in the story, I think. Water, rain, sea, salt, sweat is one general theme. And the sky, the bruising sky, which meant the blue sky because bruise in Taiwanese is black-blue (烏青, oo-tshenn) and bruise-blue (瘀青, yūchīng) in Mandarin. The same character for blue (青, chīng) can be combined with the character fo sky (天, tiān) to mean sky (青天, chīngtiān) and so the sky is blue. The (controversial) national flag of Taiwan is described as “blue sky, white sun, red ground everywhere” (青天白日滿地紅). Red like blood, and white as in White Terror (see Taiwanese history of martial law period from 1949 to 1987), white snakes, and a hint of racism in the US. There are also political elements of the animosity between Taiwanese and Chinese. And why were there crabs in Bestiary? My theory is that crab (蟹, xiè) sounds exactly like flood and excretion (洩/瀉), and therefore water again, and the gruesomeness of piss and shit everywhere in the story.
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. So not only do we have cannibalism here, we also have the complex relationship between children and parents. In The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars (二十四孝), there is also tasting one’s parent’s feces to determine whether or not they are sick. Ingestion of excretion. Also, are you you when you were born from your (biological) parents’ flesh?
The Tayals believe that there once were two suns, and their warriors carried babies who grew up to be the men who tried to shoot down one sun. An arrow struck one of the suns and it bled lava. When it died, its corpse became the moon. And from this fable, we have the image of the sun and the moon, the living and the dead, a cycle that repeats itself, opposites with the same roots, and blood and that everything is alive.
According to the Seediq (賽德克族), a tribe of the Tayals, a god and a goddess (or were they siblings?) from a half-petrified tree trunk (note the polarity: half-living and half-dead of a tree) sired many children. Back then, cooking a tiny piece of a grain would produce a full pot of porridge, boiling a boar’s hair meant having a full pot of boar’s meat. How the parts breed wholes, like planting a seed and growing what you planted. I suppose this is what Chang meant, when in Bestiary, they wanted to plant human body parts in holes and water to grow people.
And then the contrasting ideas of whole and hole. There are a lot of holes in Bestiary—holes on human bodies, in bone marrows (like spine which is like rivers and the Great Walls of China), in the ground. Are they holes or are they what make things whole?
Writing this review and analysis makes my head feel like it’s exploding and spinning. The whole book is written with wordplay—wordplays between Mandarin and English, in-between English, in-between Mandarin, beyond languages and tongues, and based on Tayal folklore and the cycle of life and death, of consumption and creation. Note that I haven’t mentioned the queer elements in Bestiary. The characters are casually queer, with sapphic and achillean characters alike, and brief comments on countless genders and non-gendered pronouns in spoken Mandarin. I feel like queerness isn’t the main point of the book.
Bestiary is not an easy read. It is repulsive, mystic, and densely packed. It is a story that spans three generations of women, vicious and unbreakable cycles and ties of life, death, and everything in between.
Buddy read with Kes! Check out their review on Instagram here!
September 18, 2020
If you are a person of colour, a person of diaspora—Bestiary will resonate in a profound way. It will be a familiar story of alienation, survival/beauty, resilience.
Yet it will be wholly unfamiliar, too: every word is saturated with a sense of magical realism. Throughout it all, the lyrical serenity of the prose feels at odds with the unflinching violence that it captures—it’s discomfiting. It will throw you off.
All the Western stereotypes you’ve heard about East Asian people (that we are desexualized, sanitized, emotionally conservative, deferent model minorities)? This book is none of those things. Bestiary is crass, corporeal, primal: the characters remain unnamed, yet you feel as intimate with them as you would a lover. It is rife with filth and beauty, so much so that it’s startling at times. Events flicker in and out of reality. Time seems to flow in a circular fashion. And familial love interweaves with sexual desire—queer desire—and potent violence.
I haven’t touched upon the plot of this book, and this was a conscious decision. There is no plot in the traditional sense, because whatever storyline exists does not unravel linearly or logically (the most I will say about plot is this: in prose that reads like poetry, three speakers—Daughter, Mother, Grandmother—convey the myths and stories that make up their diasporic history as a Taiwanese clan in America).
I’m struck by the strange and singular details, which range from the bizarre to the squicky. The moon is brown as a nipple, while trees grow moss like pubic hair. The sky is bad-breathed, freckled with stars like white bacteria on a tongue, and when Mother tells of her first job working in a chicken barn, she recalls that [h]er shits were sugared with sawdust and she bled to pass them.
All of it is so, so visceral. I’ve never read anything like it.
Ultimately, Bestiary imbues the mundane with a sense of both heartbreak and fantastical possibility, and it was a gutting combination to read.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Yet it will be wholly unfamiliar, too: every word is saturated with a sense of magical realism. Throughout it all, the lyrical serenity of the prose feels at odds with the unflinching violence that it captures—it’s discomfiting. It will throw you off.
All the Western stereotypes you’ve heard about East Asian people (that we are desexualized, sanitized, emotionally conservative, deferent model minorities)? This book is none of those things. Bestiary is crass, corporeal, primal: the characters remain unnamed, yet you feel as intimate with them as you would a lover. It is rife with filth and beauty, so much so that it’s startling at times. Events flicker in and out of reality. Time seems to flow in a circular fashion. And familial love interweaves with sexual desire—queer desire—and potent violence.
My mother said it was the only story she wanted me to own. My inheritance was hurt.
I haven’t touched upon the plot of this book, and this was a conscious decision. There is no plot in the traditional sense, because whatever storyline exists does not unravel linearly or logically (the most I will say about plot is this: in prose that reads like poetry, three speakers—Daughter, Mother, Grandmother—convey the myths and stories that make up their diasporic history as a Taiwanese clan in America).
I’m struck by the strange and singular details, which range from the bizarre to the squicky. The moon is brown as a nipple, while trees grow moss like pubic hair. The sky is bad-breathed, freckled with stars like white bacteria on a tongue, and when Mother tells of her first job working in a chicken barn, she recalls that [h]er shits were sugared with sawdust and she bled to pass them.
All of it is so, so visceral. I’ve never read anything like it.
When I shoved the scab aside with my fingernails, there was a hole beneath, deep as my finger and bloodless as a glove socket. I slid my forefinger in, trying to diagnose what kind of hole it was. I named every hole-species I knew: wells; wombs; wounds; spots in the wall where my brother stuck his pencil through, thinking the walls would scab on their own, and when they didn’t, he sealed them with his boogers and let them petrify into stone; lakes; seas, which meant most of the world was a hole, which meant I was native to holes, animal burrows, anuses, atlases. Twirling my finger inside the hole above my ass, I decided that it must be the beginning of a fault-line, a seismic shift of my spine.
Ultimately, Bestiary imbues the mundane with a sense of both heartbreak and fantastical possibility, and it was a gutting combination to read.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
October 19, 2024
prosaic. poetic. epistolary. bestiary is a feat in genre b(l)ending that employs every one of the senses—and then some. it is gorgeously grotesque and deeply experimental. you are not likely to encounter another narrative voice this inventive, this frenzied, with such a strong command—and disregard—for the english language. k-ming chang is a force to be reckoned with and a poet who never pulls her punches. in fact, bestiary might be best described as a pummeling—wild, brash, rendered in brutal, bruise-like color.
her debut novel interrogates not just generational trauma, but also generational myth: the mediums it inhabits (oral, written, the natural world as it is infringed upon by human inventions like war) and the ways it is both muddied and thrown into sharp relief by migration, by desire, by destruction. in many ways, bestiary is a novel of transition and of succession, as mothers and daughters flit between birth and death, as they trace their lineage and try to make sense of their own bodies, of the anguish they've inherited from each other. they are wrenched apart, then thrown together again. they are forced to reconcile violence with love and love with violence. in a world ruled by men, these women are crowned most beautiful, most beastly, most brazen.
but before all of that, they are human.
after? fantastically animal.
k-ming understands better than most that the pain passed down through family can be just as disturbing as it is liberating, that to grow up we must grow into and out of our ancestors' worst memories. more than that, though, we must make space for our own. here, fabulism feeds into stories of gay love, of triumph and tragedy, of blooming desire. bestiary is a remastering of reality wherein humans and nature are never not in conversation with one another. they are coupled like queer lovers. moreover, this gay love is never made to feel unwelcome, or isolated. instead, it is the norm, and its opposite ill-fitting.
if you're looking for a strange, startling novel that subverts the anglo-american literary tradition, that is as crude as it is stunning, and that threads story/memory/myth together like the braids of an unbreakable bridge, this is a must-read and a new favorite.
hats off to k-ming, whose language lives at the edge of enigmatic, and who manages to be both tender and cruel, restrained and unruly, absurd and exceptionally, painstakingly wise.
her debut novel interrogates not just generational trauma, but also generational myth: the mediums it inhabits (oral, written, the natural world as it is infringed upon by human inventions like war) and the ways it is both muddied and thrown into sharp relief by migration, by desire, by destruction. in many ways, bestiary is a novel of transition and of succession, as mothers and daughters flit between birth and death, as they trace their lineage and try to make sense of their own bodies, of the anguish they've inherited from each other. they are wrenched apart, then thrown together again. they are forced to reconcile violence with love and love with violence. in a world ruled by men, these women are crowned most beautiful, most beastly, most brazen.
but before all of that, they are human.
after? fantastically animal.
k-ming understands better than most that the pain passed down through family can be just as disturbing as it is liberating, that to grow up we must grow into and out of our ancestors' worst memories. more than that, though, we must make space for our own. here, fabulism feeds into stories of gay love, of triumph and tragedy, of blooming desire. bestiary is a remastering of reality wherein humans and nature are never not in conversation with one another. they are coupled like queer lovers. moreover, this gay love is never made to feel unwelcome, or isolated. instead, it is the norm, and its opposite ill-fitting.
if you're looking for a strange, startling novel that subverts the anglo-american literary tradition, that is as crude as it is stunning, and that threads story/memory/myth together like the braids of an unbreakable bridge, this is a must-read and a new favorite.
hats off to k-ming, whose language lives at the edge of enigmatic, and who manages to be both tender and cruel, restrained and unruly, absurd and exceptionally, painstakingly wise.
August 12, 2021
1.5/5stars
Gosh I wanted to love this so much LOL my fiance bought me this cause he said it sounded perfectly up my alley and I totally agree - queer, magical realism, about a young taiwanese girl who is discovering herself. But, while this was an interesting story and beautifully written, was so unnecessarily over the top gross and grotesque. At first it felt like it was a ploy to make people grossed out and shocked, but it just continued the ENTIRE BOOK. So much talk of shit, piss, ass holes, and grotesque descriptions of things that are usually described beautifully - like kissing, touching, and discovering your body. I just felt it was so unnecessary and so gimmicky in the sense of after the first few chapters of this type of description I was like "please, I GET IT. STOP." and it really took away from the enjoyment of the story but also the story as a whole.
Gosh I wanted to love this so much LOL my fiance bought me this cause he said it sounded perfectly up my alley and I totally agree - queer, magical realism, about a young taiwanese girl who is discovering herself. But, while this was an interesting story and beautifully written, was so unnecessarily over the top gross and grotesque. At first it felt like it was a ploy to make people grossed out and shocked, but it just continued the ENTIRE BOOK. So much talk of shit, piss, ass holes, and grotesque descriptions of things that are usually described beautifully - like kissing, touching, and discovering your body. I just felt it was so unnecessary and so gimmicky in the sense of after the first few chapters of this type of description I was like "please, I GET IT. STOP." and it really took away from the enjoyment of the story but also the story as a whole.
July 15, 2020
In the animal encyclopedia Ben and I memorized, every hierarchy had a name. Every violence a vocabulary. Somewhere, there was a name for our exchange, in a language that was kept from us.
Author K-Ming Chang might be known best for her poetry and that poetic sensibility shines through on every page of her first novel, Bestiary. Filled with myth and allusion, in sentences crackling with lyric inventiveness, Chang explores three generations of Taiwanese-Americans, using the imagery of muck and filth to expose the unacknowledged beauty in otherness (trust me, it works). Employing a variety of styles and shifting POVs, there's nothing straightforward in Bestiary, but I was captivated by these characters and their lives; dazzled by the language. Just a stellar debut. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That's why she thinks we're compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.
With scenes set in Taiwan, Arkansas, and California, Bestiary describes the evolution of a family that first came to the United States more or less as refugees (if I knew the history of Taiwan better, I'd better understand the forces that led them to flee their homeland), but even the third generation (“Daughter” and her brother, who were born in the States) seem no closer to being fully accepted by their fellow Americans than their parents and grandparents. There are scenes of racism (even within the family, as both the mother and the grandmother regret having married men from “the mainland”; with the grandmother, it's even unclear just how consensual her relationship was with this PTSD-afflicted former Chinese soldier), domestic violence, and crushing poverty. On the positive side, there are also the treasured passing down of Taiwanese myth and legends, moments of loving family connection, and when Daughter's friendship with fellow Asian student, Ben (a girl), blossoms into romance, the connection is deep and redemptive. And throughout, we read the myths and witness fabulous events that temper gritty realism with magical realism and I was strongly reminded of both Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater and fellow Taiwanese writer Miny-Yi Wu's The Man with the Compound Eyes.
I'm not going to change the sheets for you, not even if you wet yourself. Why do you think you're sweating so much? Because you're sick? It's the sea in you. That stretch of sheet where you've pissed the mattress: a shoreline. The heart's a fish. If you open your mouth, it'll swim out of you, touch air, die. When I say shut your mouth, I mean survive.
The meat of this immigrant story was very interesting to me, but it's Chang's poetic sense that most dazzled. I could have excerpted something from just about every page, so the many following examples I've chosen should be seen as restraint (lol). Some imagery that hooked me:
• Only my mother could call to me like that, a sound worn fist-smooth, a sound I could saddle and ride, relieved for a second of my own weight while she carried me in her mouth.
• She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife as if auditioning to be its blade.
• She told me she was blowing boys in the woods. And for years I imagined she was blowing them up, shearing open their bellies and burying dynamite inside, necklaces of boymeat dangling from the trees.
Chang describes the sun or the moon or the sky at the opening of most scenes and it fascinated me to see how often she metaphorically tied the heavenly realm to the baseness of human corporeality:
• The night bruised its kneecap moon.
• Ma leaves the house early. Sunup: the sky bleeding where it's given birth.
• It was early in the night and the sky was bad-breathed, freckled with stars like white bacteria on a tongue.
• Above us, the moon was marinating in its own silver sweat.
• The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum.
• It's summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks.
Characters become infected by nature (a girl can grow a tiger tale, be impregnated by rivers, swallow a sandstorm) and the natural world develops human characteristics (holes dug in the yard become mouths, eating offerings and regurgitating letters from afar), and while poverty, racism, and domestic chaos all threaten to alienate Daughter and Ben from those around them, when these teenage girls find each other, it makes for a very sweet love story:
The only time the holes were coherent was when Ben and I touched. When we kissed in front of them, they cinched their lips and listened, opening only to say yes, yes. While night erected itself around us like a tent, we sat cross-legged on the soil and its tapestry of worms. Ben laced her legs around my waist. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. I leaned forward, flicked her upper lip with my bottom one. We met inside our mouths. I found the seam under her tongue and undid it. With my hands around her, I felt her spine through her shirt, a ladder to thirst. All around us, the holes were full of bright sound, jingling like a handful of nickels.
The love scenes don't get much more graphic than that and I both appreciated that the poetic language elevated these scenes above base mechanics and also that their relationship is unquestioningly accepted by those around them; there are same-sex encounters in the historical myths and stories, too, and it's all just presented as a natural part of life. The nonstop flow of bodily fluids throughout Bestiary might be offputting to a reader, but again, it's all used in the service of lyricism and I simply found it all fascinating. Chang's is a unique and talented voice, and as she made me care deeply about her characters while educating me on their difficult, outsider lives – in strange and engaging language – I'd have to call this novel a success; maybe not for every reader, but it certainly worked for me.
September 18, 2020
This debut novel was a delight to read. The language is relentlessly metaphorical--there are some really nice things going on at the sentence-level..
Here's a representative sentence:
"Ama's hands were canyoned with calluses, carved out by some river she'd reined in her hands."
I liked this language, and I liked the story. The pacing felt a little off to me. There is a sameness in tone throughout, with little dialog or variation in the sentence beats. I always felt as if I were exactly the same distances from events, and that distance was arms-length.
All that said, though, I enjoyed the slightly unhinged quality of the first-person storytelling very much, and I'll definitely be looking for Chang's next book.
Here's a representative sentence:
"Ama's hands were canyoned with calluses, carved out by some river she'd reined in her hands."
I liked this language, and I liked the story. The pacing felt a little off to me. There is a sameness in tone throughout, with little dialog or variation in the sentence beats. I always felt as if I were exactly the same distances from events, and that distance was arms-length.
All that said, though, I enjoyed the slightly unhinged quality of the first-person storytelling very much, and I'll definitely be looking for Chang's next book.
July 14, 2020
Thanks to Netgalley and the publishing for reaching out to me FIRST with an ARC of this. Unfortunately, I was unable to finish the book and made it about of a quarter into it before I had to stop.
Thank you to my Goodreads friends whom I polled and was assured by that it was okay to not finish an ARC! I felt really weird doing so but I could not read another page.
I was very drawn in by the idea of Asian folklore and queer inclusion, but this book quickly devolved into a stream of consciousness narrative that my brain could not follow. A recounting of family stories, if told by a drunk person very focused on...bodily functions. If you asked me where I left off what was happening, I honestly could not tell you. And then…there was this weird realism to it. The writing is very poetic at times, very gritty and it’s like the scene is right before your eyes, so at first it was heavily reminiscent of Han Kang’s prose. Very unsettling at times to read but not necessarily bad. But the content in this book…I can take gore, and scenes of blood, but for whatever reason, this book was really bluntly focused on details of bodily functions and strange metaphors of the same. I saw another review mention the “scatological” vocabulary of the book, and that tracks. I found myself…very grossed out by what was happening and being described. A little too gritty, a little too realistic. I think there’s a niche set of readers who may enjoy this, and unfortunately, I am not one of them.
Thank you to my Goodreads friends whom I polled and was assured by that it was okay to not finish an ARC! I felt really weird doing so but I could not read another page.
I was very drawn in by the idea of Asian folklore and queer inclusion, but this book quickly devolved into a stream of consciousness narrative that my brain could not follow. A recounting of family stories, if told by a drunk person very focused on...bodily functions. If you asked me where I left off what was happening, I honestly could not tell you. And then…there was this weird realism to it. The writing is very poetic at times, very gritty and it’s like the scene is right before your eyes, so at first it was heavily reminiscent of Han Kang’s prose. Very unsettling at times to read but not necessarily bad. But the content in this book…I can take gore, and scenes of blood, but for whatever reason, this book was really bluntly focused on details of bodily functions and strange metaphors of the same. I saw another review mention the “scatological” vocabulary of the book, and that tracks. I found myself…very grossed out by what was happening and being described. A little too gritty, a little too realistic. I think there’s a niche set of readers who may enjoy this, and unfortunately, I am not one of them.
September 18, 2020
Bestiary by K-Ming Chang follows three generations of Taiwanese-American women. The author describes it as "part migration story, part mythological retelling, part queer love story." 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. Among many strangenesses, there are holes in the back yard that spit out letters from her estranged grandmother.
If I can compare this book to anything, it felt similar in voice to The Discomfort of Evening(which just won the International Booker so that's no light praise) because of the world of the children but the story has more complexity due to the multiple generations and the Hu Gu Po (tiger spirit). You can tell the author is a poet in all the writing but especially in the letters from the grandmother.
I had a copy of the book from the publisher through NetGalley; it comes out September 29.
If I can compare this book to anything, it felt similar in voice to The Discomfort of Evening(which just won the International Booker so that's no light praise) because of the world of the children but the story has more complexity due to the multiple generations and the Hu Gu Po (tiger spirit). You can tell the author is a poet in all the writing but especially in the letters from the grandmother.
I had a copy of the book from the publisher through NetGalley; it comes out September 29.
July 27, 2021
I had high expectations for Bestiary based on its premise. It is marketed as a mythological, magical realist novel following a Taiwanese-American family’s queer history with a particular focus on its women. However, my reading experience was far more muted, possibly even disappointing. I’m not entirely sure what K-Ming Chang’s intention was with this narrative. If it was to tell a story of immigration, lineage and personal history, I’m not sure if it’s entirely successful.
The narration switches between the Mother and the Daughters' perspectives, interspersed with letters from the Grandmother. The storytelling is saturated with surrealism, so much so that the main plot arc is nearly lost in the multiple myths and magical realist fables woven in. Adding to the obscurity of the plot is Chang’s writing style itself which felt disjointed and bloated, straddling the border between prose and poetry, realism and surrealism, not quite achieving either.
Chang is first and foremost a poet, and it clearly shows. There is so much imagery at play here, whilst some of it was really quite inventive, there was also plenty of imagery and symbolism that just felt really odd. She seemed to have a curious fascination for bodily secretions and the more gross, baser functions of the body and it oftentimes appeared in instances where it made no sense. For example, there was a line where she writes of warplanes dropping bombs as ‘anuses that dilated open and shat bombs, spraying diarrhea that scarred your skin’. Really? Are we really talking warplane anuses here? And I’m only scratching the surface, there’s a lot of really strange imagery that, more often than not, didn’t work for me. There wasn’t much character development either and I was often getting confused with who’s who, the motivations behind their actions and the inner conflicts, mere guesswork.
I know I’ve made it seem like there is no redeeming quality to this book and it’s not the case. Certain sections and fables were very well written as standalone pieces. For me, personally, the novel just wasn’t cohesive enough, the characters really not distinctive from one another and the main thrust of the novel lost under the overbearing weight of its obscure imagery.
The narration switches between the Mother and the Daughters' perspectives, interspersed with letters from the Grandmother. The storytelling is saturated with surrealism, so much so that the main plot arc is nearly lost in the multiple myths and magical realist fables woven in. Adding to the obscurity of the plot is Chang’s writing style itself which felt disjointed and bloated, straddling the border between prose and poetry, realism and surrealism, not quite achieving either.
Chang is first and foremost a poet, and it clearly shows. There is so much imagery at play here, whilst some of it was really quite inventive, there was also plenty of imagery and symbolism that just felt really odd. She seemed to have a curious fascination for bodily secretions and the more gross, baser functions of the body and it oftentimes appeared in instances where it made no sense. For example, there was a line where she writes of warplanes dropping bombs as ‘anuses that dilated open and shat bombs, spraying diarrhea that scarred your skin’. Really? Are we really talking warplane anuses here? And I’m only scratching the surface, there’s a lot of really strange imagery that, more often than not, didn’t work for me. There wasn’t much character development either and I was often getting confused with who’s who, the motivations behind their actions and the inner conflicts, mere guesswork.
I know I’ve made it seem like there is no redeeming quality to this book and it’s not the case. Certain sections and fables were very well written as standalone pieces. For me, personally, the novel just wasn’t cohesive enough, the characters really not distinctive from one another and the main thrust of the novel lost under the overbearing weight of its obscure imagery.
June 19, 2023
Once, I asked her what happened to a body when it died. She said it became a story, and death was just another translation of it.
Bestiary is not gentle or softly lyrical.
It is grotesque, crude, visceral, beautiful and fantastical all at once. It depicts the body as the housing of generational traumas, stories, language and queer desires. It breaks apart conventions of the English language with abandon and straddles the space between genres. It defies the Western-Anglo expectations of a ‘traditional’ immigration novel. It is both a mythical retelling and a coming-of-age story and I loved every bit of it.
Bestiary is not gentle or softly lyrical.
It is grotesque, crude, visceral, beautiful and fantastical all at once. It depicts the body as the housing of generational traumas, stories, language and queer desires. It breaks apart conventions of the English language with abandon and straddles the space between genres. It defies the Western-Anglo expectations of a ‘traditional’ immigration novel. It is both a mythical retelling and a coming-of-age story and I loved every bit of it.
September 15, 2020
Synopsis from the publisher: "Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this blazing debut about one family's queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets."
I usually give high marks to books of magical realism that I find wildly inventive but I have to admit I grew tired of this one towards the end. Perhaps a bit too foul for my tastes.
I received an arc of this debut novel from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
I usually give high marks to books of magical realism that I find wildly inventive but I have to admit I grew tired of this one towards the end. Perhaps a bit too foul for my tastes.
I received an arc of this debut novel from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
June 12, 2020
i was so excited when i first heard about k-ming chang’s forthcoming novel and absolutely thrilled when it showed up as an arc i could request on netgalley!!!! i love everything about chang’s short writing – its sensuousness and its twistiness and the way it marries grief and longing – and this book provides that in spades while still retaining the complexity/integrity of a novel that unfolds slowly. every chapter had moments that left me breathless but the prose was never precious or overwrought. i think that’s what k-ming chang does best actually, write gorgeously with sentences and phrases you can dwell on and get lost in while scaffolding them into an entire intergenerational saga. i’m obsessed with it!!!
in many ways the novel feels like a spiral – told primarily through the daughter’s attempts to understand her mother, her tayal grandmother and the aunts she doesn’t know, but also the wildness inside of her and ben, the girl she loves. we’re introduced to the general story of her family but those moments are returned to over and over and told through the eyes of her mother and her grandmother too, and in the process of retelling chang both tells and shows how history is poeisis is romance, how storytelling (whether written or spoken or remembered) makes sense of the past and transforms our humanity – in this case literally.
i’m grateful, also, that i had a certain amount of context (as a chinese american from the mainland) to really resonate with some of the sticky, corporeal experiences that chang is able to put into words.... but also really excited about a book that features an indigenous taiwanese matriarch and the complicated ways that chinese and japanese imperialism have shaped her life + the lives of her descendants. it’s hard to even wrap my mind around everything chang does so masterfully here. the magical realism is poignant and more than a story of mothers and daughters its also a story of queer love between women, and the mutability and animation of the gendered body. and on top of THAT it manages levity, too, like the kind of twisted humor of buying and eating cat food from the grocery on accident, or thinking that a handjob is any job you do with your hands, or annotating translations of your grandmother’s letters with your teenage girlfriend as courtship ritual. there’s just soooo much and i definitely want to buy a copy of this when it finally releases TT_______TT
in many ways the novel feels like a spiral – told primarily through the daughter’s attempts to understand her mother, her tayal grandmother and the aunts she doesn’t know, but also the wildness inside of her and ben, the girl she loves. we’re introduced to the general story of her family but those moments are returned to over and over and told through the eyes of her mother and her grandmother too, and in the process of retelling chang both tells and shows how history is poeisis is romance, how storytelling (whether written or spoken or remembered) makes sense of the past and transforms our humanity – in this case literally.
i’m grateful, also, that i had a certain amount of context (as a chinese american from the mainland) to really resonate with some of the sticky, corporeal experiences that chang is able to put into words.... but also really excited about a book that features an indigenous taiwanese matriarch and the complicated ways that chinese and japanese imperialism have shaped her life + the lives of her descendants. it’s hard to even wrap my mind around everything chang does so masterfully here. the magical realism is poignant and more than a story of mothers and daughters its also a story of queer love between women, and the mutability and animation of the gendered body. and on top of THAT it manages levity, too, like the kind of twisted humor of buying and eating cat food from the grocery on accident, or thinking that a handjob is any job you do with your hands, or annotating translations of your grandmother’s letters with your teenage girlfriend as courtship ritual. there’s just soooo much and i definitely want to buy a copy of this when it finally releases TT_______TT
September 12, 2020
In Bestiary, K-Ming Chang upturns earth and language in equal measure. Every page is percussive, hypnotizing, and maddeningly smart. I am stunned by the imaginative reach of this debut, the remarkable prose. Chang isn’t just a new voice in the landscape, she is building a new landscape entirely.
January 1, 2021
Part mythology, part immigrant story, part a queer love story
Highlights:
- very raw, primal and visceral; ugliness is given a surreal twist at places.
The book doesn't focus on beauty all around, unlike many books of magical realism (eg: moss like pubic hair)
- Prose that hits you on the face "Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba...We're the ones she kept. brought here, and beat".
"I was born with a gord shaped head. my Ma kneaded it back to a sphere while by bones were still milk
- very very surreal. A girl grows into a tree. A tiger spirits inhabits bodies of women. A daughter wakes up with a tiger tail that she keeps hidden. A woman who unscrews toes of sleeping daughters and snacks on them calling them (bones) 'peanuts'. And that's just the first few pages.
- I enjoyed being immersed in the weird and strange in the book. This is done so well. If you enjoy magical realism, you will love so many pages. I read an e-copy and I wish I had a physical book to underline.
- The poetic prose
"Our mother's teeth were brittle with lies", "The silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string"
What didn't work for me:
The book is written in first person. 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. I kept wishing this book was in third person. (I wouldn't say poetic prose does not make the reader connected. I enjoyed On Earth we are briefly gorgeous which is overly lyrical and still establishes a good connection).
Rating : 3.5
Thanks to Vintage for an e-copy. All opinions my own
Highlights:
- very raw, primal and visceral; ugliness is given a surreal twist at places.
The book doesn't focus on beauty all around, unlike many books of magical realism (eg: moss like pubic hair)
- Prose that hits you on the face "Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba...We're the ones she kept. brought here, and beat".
"I was born with a gord shaped head. my Ma kneaded it back to a sphere while by bones were still milk
- very very surreal. A girl grows into a tree. A tiger spirits inhabits bodies of women. A daughter wakes up with a tiger tail that she keeps hidden. A woman who unscrews toes of sleeping daughters and snacks on them calling them (bones) 'peanuts'. And that's just the first few pages.
- I enjoyed being immersed in the weird and strange in the book. This is done so well. If you enjoy magical realism, you will love so many pages. I read an e-copy and I wish I had a physical book to underline.
- The poetic prose
"Our mother's teeth were brittle with lies", "The silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string"
What didn't work for me:
The book is written in first person. 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. I kept wishing this book was in third person. (I wouldn't say poetic prose does not make the reader connected. I enjoyed On Earth we are briefly gorgeous which is overly lyrical and still establishes a good connection).
Rating : 3.5
Thanks to Vintage for an e-copy. All opinions my own
November 10, 2020
This book is sooo bizarre, but I honestly couldn’t turn away.
November 4, 2020
BESTIARY revolves around alternate perspectives by three generations of Taiwanese-American women: ama, mother and daughter. When the daughter and her brother dig a series of holes in their backyard and the holes become open and hungry, a tiger tail grows in the daughter after she is beaten by her mother as a punishment. As a Taiwanese descendant, I was immediately impressed by the concept.
I have complicated feelings about this book - my whole experience with this novel was whether I was missing something.
I really appreciated that this novel was inspired by Hu Gu Po, a famous and old Taiwanese mythology - reading it felt like navigating in a familiar ground. Through grotesque images, Chang paints the desire of each character and explores intimacy inside the family. The author also incorporates violent impulses to illustrate the generational trauma and at the same time, unfolds layers of buried (literally and figuratively) secrets of the entire lineage.
While the Taiwanese cultural elements were accurate and refreshing, unfortunately some aspects of this book didn't work for me.
To begin with, I found the writing poetic yet crude - the palpitating language isn't for everyone and it often distracted my reading. I usually enjoy when the reality blends with imaginary, however the magical realism in this case wasn't favorable for me to follow the storyline and it felt disjointed at times. Additionally, I couldn't get into the bodily functions/fluids and visceral descriptions. Even though the grandmother's letters were original in structure and relevant to the plot, I didn't fully capture its essence. I know the author's intention to create a chaotic work, but my interest was back and forth nonetheless.
I truly wanted to love this mythological retelling. BESTIARY is unique, playful and can offer a surreal experience for many readers. It is a story that demands time and feels like a process of excavation. I very much enjoyed the moral of the story and the subjective footnotes but I think that I didn't dig deep enough, hence this book is worth a re-read. Still having many unresolved questions, I listened to "Kirkus Fully Booked podcast with K-Ming Chang"; “@thereadingwomen podcast interview with K-Ming Chang” and it was very helpful.
Readers who enjoy migration story or mythological retelling or queer love story should give BESTIARY a try.
(I initially read BESTIARY in ebook format and it didn't help with my reading experience - this format compromised the letters structure and footnotes. Thus I highly recommend reading this book in physical format.)
[ I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review ]
I have complicated feelings about this book - my whole experience with this novel was whether I was missing something.
I really appreciated that this novel was inspired by Hu Gu Po, a famous and old Taiwanese mythology - reading it felt like navigating in a familiar ground. Through grotesque images, Chang paints the desire of each character and explores intimacy inside the family. The author also incorporates violent impulses to illustrate the generational trauma and at the same time, unfolds layers of buried (literally and figuratively) secrets of the entire lineage.
While the Taiwanese cultural elements were accurate and refreshing, unfortunately some aspects of this book didn't work for me.
To begin with, I found the writing poetic yet crude - the palpitating language isn't for everyone and it often distracted my reading. I usually enjoy when the reality blends with imaginary, however the magical realism in this case wasn't favorable for me to follow the storyline and it felt disjointed at times. Additionally, I couldn't get into the bodily functions/fluids and visceral descriptions. Even though the grandmother's letters were original in structure and relevant to the plot, I didn't fully capture its essence. I know the author's intention to create a chaotic work, but my interest was back and forth nonetheless.
I truly wanted to love this mythological retelling. BESTIARY is unique, playful and can offer a surreal experience for many readers. It is a story that demands time and feels like a process of excavation. I very much enjoyed the moral of the story and the subjective footnotes but I think that I didn't dig deep enough, hence this book is worth a re-read. Still having many unresolved questions, I listened to "Kirkus Fully Booked podcast with K-Ming Chang"; “@thereadingwomen podcast interview with K-Ming Chang” and it was very helpful.
Readers who enjoy migration story or mythological retelling or queer love story should give BESTIARY a try.
(I initially read BESTIARY in ebook format and it didn't help with my reading experience - this format compromised the letters structure and footnotes. Thus I highly recommend reading this book in physical format.)
[ I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review ]
November 1, 2020
Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.
On my blog.
Rep: Taiwanese & Taiwanese American cast, lesbian mc, wlw characters, mlm side characters, side character with PTSD(?)
CWs: child abuse, domestic abuse, amputation, gore
Galley provided by publisher
Bestiary is a hard book to review for me. It’s one of those ones that you give 4 stars and then you think, okay but why did I like it so much. And all I can really conclude is that I don’t know why this book — an adult contemporary, you might even say literary fiction, book — did what other literary fiction books failed to do and got me enjoying it.
I think however, what may answer that question, first and foremost, is the writing. I think I’ve mentioned in a previous review that one of the things that puts me off adult general fiction is a tendency towards the grotesque, in that the writing just has to focus on the grossness of life. This book did the same, but it did it in a fabulist, poetic way, so I actually really liked that about it.
The story is a generational saga, following a daughter, a mother and a grandmother, switching back and forth between their POVs as the story unfolds. So you get to learn the motivations of each character through their own eyes, even as you see them through the others’. Which, again, I loved about this. It lets the characters be their own selves, flawed as that often is.
It’s also a weird little story, to be honest. As in, the fabulism of it leans towards less fantastical as you may expect, but oddly fantastical. I don’t know if that makes an ounce of sense, but I really liked that about it. Combine that with the gorgeous writing and it was just a book I didn’t want to put down for one second.
So, really, if this book wasn’t already on your radar, you should definitely rectify that.
January 8, 2021
This book is a jarring and magical, grotesque beast of a story. Fantasy, reality, past, present, beauty, horror— these lines are so finely blurred within this story, it almost feels like a fever dream. I mean this in the best way. There are a lot of very heavy themes tackled here such as finding cultural identity in an environment, not of your ancestors, sexuality, poverty, and generational curses. I loved how the Taiwanese folklore was both in and of the story itself. It felt almost three dimensional, like the magic had taken root within the crafting of the book.
⠀
If you can’t already tell, I loved BESTIARY, but also know it’s not going to be for everyone. There is a lot of imagery of body parts and bodily fluids, as well as a decent amount of violence and crude language. That didn’t bother me, but this is a trigger warning for those who might have an issue with those things. I listened to this one on audio via @prhaudio and read along with the physical book. I really loved the voice acting in the audiobook, but stylistic choices within the book’s formatting added a lot to the whole experience. I don’t see footnoting incorporated into fictional narratives quite like it was used here and it was amazing!
⠀
If you liked the eerie prose and body horror of SALT SLOW, the cultural family dynamics of HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS ARE GOLD, and/or the spellbinding fantasy of GINGERBREAD, I’d highly recommend this one to you.
⠀
If you can’t already tell, I loved BESTIARY, but also know it’s not going to be for everyone. There is a lot of imagery of body parts and bodily fluids, as well as a decent amount of violence and crude language. That didn’t bother me, but this is a trigger warning for those who might have an issue with those things. I listened to this one on audio via @prhaudio and read along with the physical book. I really loved the voice acting in the audiobook, but stylistic choices within the book’s formatting added a lot to the whole experience. I don’t see footnoting incorporated into fictional narratives quite like it was used here and it was amazing!
⠀
If you liked the eerie prose and body horror of SALT SLOW, the cultural family dynamics of HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS ARE GOLD, and/or the spellbinding fantasy of GINGERBREAD, I’d highly recommend this one to you.
August 10, 2020
I struggle reviewing this book because I couldn’t get into it and didn’t make it all the way through. The use of graphic bodily secretions and icky anatomy was excessive and I found it to be frankly way too distracting. It wasn’t the gross-out factor that bothered me, but rather the exhausted feel from every page being weighed down with such repetition in rhetorical device. I quickly grew weary of reading nonstop about spit, blood, feces, and piss multiple times on every page. The format of the story had me feeling lost as well, seeing as the family/immigration narrative was so heavily spliced with fantastical lore. I picked this book up 7 or 8 times and didn’t feel compelled to read more than a couple of pages at a time before abandoning it for something else. The synopsis had me so excited to read Bestiary, but unfortunately this ended up being a case of not gelling with the writing style.
April 13, 2022
4.5. for me this took a bit to get going but then it GOES. masterful in how it slickly oscillates between thrumming restraint and vicious propulsion. electric, heady, visceral prose that knows how to utilize its own empty space (literally). soooo much here to meticulously unravel about family and generational grief and all the ways in which myth is reified. like, what does it mean to love your mother and forgive her and resent her and owe her and be her cost to bear and want to be her yet be afraid of becoming her and exist with her, within her, without her? what can i say? k-ming chang has the range.
October 24, 2020
This is a visceral, and sometimes violent, work of fabulism, bursting with a flood of aching primal need.
The writer embodies myth and metaphor with human blood and bone, and grinds them to the marrow. Chang reminds us that imagination and stories are born of something real, and myths can help us endure the unnameable. When we can name something, we can have power over it. Struggled autonomy is a driving force behind much of the mythological imagery. Earth and Water, Birth and Death, are themes in constant conflict.
And then there are the holes, which branch off in multiple allegorical directions. I'm reminded of Alice Merton's song "No Roots." No Roots Lyrics There are holes to hide in, and holes to hide from, to be born from, and to be buried in, as safekeeping for memories, and the disgorging of answers to mysteries. Nothing is hidden which cannot be found, even deeply buried memories. Claiming power over your own body is a like taking the tiger by the tail, quite literally.
Migration itself means being uprooted and transplanted, like a tree with a new name. "Grow where you're planted," they will say, like it's as easy as breathing underwater. The myths and stories are like gravity, binding the hearers to their mothers and helping them find their roots.
Chang has a way of describing the forces of attraction which seem like a new language, written in the lover's bones. The collision of want and need is breathtakingly real and present. And the most intimate act of all is to give someone your story, and for them to give you a new name.
As an aside, the footnotes are both essential and hysterical.
This is the most imaginative and impactful book I've read this year. By the end, I felt like I'd fallen in a river, trudged through the mud and muck, covered with viscera, and given birth to a new self.
The writer embodies myth and metaphor with human blood and bone, and grinds them to the marrow. Chang reminds us that imagination and stories are born of something real, and myths can help us endure the unnameable. When we can name something, we can have power over it. Struggled autonomy is a driving force behind much of the mythological imagery. Earth and Water, Birth and Death, are themes in constant conflict.
And then there are the holes, which branch off in multiple allegorical directions. I'm reminded of Alice Merton's song "No Roots." No Roots Lyrics There are holes to hide in, and holes to hide from, to be born from, and to be buried in, as safekeeping for memories, and the disgorging of answers to mysteries. Nothing is hidden which cannot be found, even deeply buried memories. Claiming power over your own body is a like taking the tiger by the tail, quite literally.
Migration itself means being uprooted and transplanted, like a tree with a new name. "Grow where you're planted," they will say, like it's as easy as breathing underwater. The myths and stories are like gravity, binding the hearers to their mothers and helping them find their roots.
Chang has a way of describing the forces of attraction which seem like a new language, written in the lover's bones. The collision of want and need is breathtakingly real and present. And the most intimate act of all is to give someone your story, and for them to give you a new name.
As an aside, the footnotes are both essential and hysterical.
This is the most imaginative and impactful book I've read this year. By the end, I felt like I'd fallen in a river, trudged through the mud and muck, covered with viscera, and given birth to a new self.
January 26, 2021
If you are thinking of reading this book I would highly recommend reading some author interviews before you start, or at least before you might abandon reading the book (as I almost did) partway through.
I went in cold, as is my preference, and really struggled for the first 80 pages until the title chapter "Bestiary" which began to really hook me in.
This book has been compared to the works of Helen Oyeyemi and I would agree that it shares the sense of disorientation, fragmentation, surprising imagery, and verve of Oyeyemi books. Unlike Oyeyemi, Chang favors quite a lot of scatalogical imagery which after reading interviews of the author I totally get why it was there, but it was not something I can say I enjoyed. 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.
What I got from reading author interviews was the realization that I was bringing ingrained Western literary expectations to a work that was deliberately created to be its own thing and birthed from totally different story traditions, such as those from indigenous Taiwan. So reading about that helped, but also it really did take until around page 80 until I started to see a hint of a plot as well as how the stories of Mother, Daughter, and Grandmother all worked together. Also around page 80, Daughter's romance with another girl at her school began, and that relationship was such a sweet and joyous relief to the feeling of chaos, loss, anger, and despair that imbued a lot of the story.
I'm very glad I persevered. Chang challenged me and I'm glad for it.
I went in cold, as is my preference, and really struggled for the first 80 pages until the title chapter "Bestiary" which began to really hook me in.
This book has been compared to the works of Helen Oyeyemi and I would agree that it shares the sense of disorientation, fragmentation, surprising imagery, and verve of Oyeyemi books. Unlike Oyeyemi, Chang favors quite a lot of scatalogical imagery which after reading interviews of the author I totally get why it was there, but it was not something I can say I enjoyed. 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.
What I got from reading author interviews was the realization that I was bringing ingrained Western literary expectations to a work that was deliberately created to be its own thing and birthed from totally different story traditions, such as those from indigenous Taiwan. So reading about that helped, but also it really did take until around page 80 until I started to see a hint of a plot as well as how the stories of Mother, Daughter, and Grandmother all worked together. Also around page 80, Daughter's romance with another girl at her school began, and that relationship was such a sweet and joyous relief to the feeling of chaos, loss, anger, and despair that imbued a lot of the story.
I'm very glad I persevered. Chang challenged me and I'm glad for it.
October 30, 2020
Sigh. I really wanted to love this as the premise sounded so promising - the Goodreads blurb describes the novel as "a lyrical and electrifying novel of migration, queer lineages and girlhood" - but it was too fantastical and bizarre for my liking. The character development was limited, and it often felt like a string of disconnected events cobbled together into an incoherent narrative. It's also pretty graphic, but in a gratuitous sort of way. The setting wasn't well evoked either. Not for me!
Thank you Netgalley and Random House UK / Vintage for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you Netgalley and Random House UK / Vintage for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
November 2, 2020
this was painful to get through. bestiary is praised for having prose full of vivid imagery, and uh, it sure has. number of times the word "piss" appears in this book: 38. number of times the word "pee" appears in this book: 25. number of times the word "shit" appears in this book: 47.
my tongue slipped into her nostril and a pebble of dried mucus dissolved on my tongue.
i didn't see the point of this gratuitous repulsiveness; it felt like the author was desperate to make this a gritty, filthy, primal novel, but it was so over-done. exhausting to read.
i think k-ming chang has a great talent, but this book was clearly not for me.
my tongue slipped into her nostril and a pebble of dried mucus dissolved on my tongue.
i didn't see the point of this gratuitous repulsiveness; it felt like the author was desperate to make this a gritty, filthy, primal novel, but it was so over-done. exhausting to read.
i think k-ming chang has a great talent, but this book was clearly not for me.
June 15, 2020
(Disclaimer: I received this book from Edelweiss. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
I struggled with Bestiary and still don't know if I'm the right audience for this book. You know those books where you wonder, "Am I missing something? Will everyone else understand this but me?" That's my entire experience with Bestiary. Bestiary is incredibly experimental in a way that either readers will LOVE or HATE (to be clear I don't hate this!) Full of little almost vignette style chapters, Bestiary is a book steeped in imagery and felt surreal. Chang's queer debut is, at times, both grotesque and gorgeous. There are sentences and chapters that made me take a pause. Almost like Chang records the thoughts, fears, and feelings we have which are actualized.
Overall, to truly enjoy Bestiary, I think it's a book that has to sit with you. To find the kernels within the text and to accept that you might not understand everything. They are stories of survival, of trauma, of acceptance, and sacrifice. It definitely pushes the boundaries and expectations and I can always appreciate a book that challenges our anticipations. If you're looking for a literary fiction novel that will shock you, then definitely check out Bestiary.
I struggled with Bestiary and still don't know if I'm the right audience for this book. You know those books where you wonder, "Am I missing something? Will everyone else understand this but me?" That's my entire experience with Bestiary. Bestiary is incredibly experimental in a way that either readers will LOVE or HATE (to be clear I don't hate this!) Full of little almost vignette style chapters, Bestiary is a book steeped in imagery and felt surreal. Chang's queer debut is, at times, both grotesque and gorgeous. There are sentences and chapters that made me take a pause. Almost like Chang records the thoughts, fears, and feelings we have which are actualized.
Overall, to truly enjoy Bestiary, I think it's a book that has to sit with you. To find the kernels within the text and to accept that you might not understand everything. They are stories of survival, of trauma, of acceptance, and sacrifice. It definitely pushes the boundaries and expectations and I can always appreciate a book that challenges our anticipations. If you're looking for a literary fiction novel that will shock you, then definitely check out Bestiary.
Read
May 6, 2020I'm going to need a minute to process what I just read.
January 9, 2025
A coworker invited me to join her book club, and I told her I’m not sure if I have time for a second, but I’d at least read their next selection because the synopsis sounded really promising. So this is…
*(Other) Book Club February Pick*
Now, about that synopsis: It promises “Three generations of Taiwanese American women… haunted by the myths of their homeland,” a tiger spirit, mysterious holes spitting up letters from the girl’s grandma (Ama), and a lesbian romance with a neighborhood girl “with strange powers of her own.”
What you really get, however, is a tangle of myths and family history with an aimless plot, oversaturated in figurative language. I understand that magical realism is meant to blur the lines between fantasy and reality (I like Matthew Strecher’s definition: a “realistic setting… invaded by something too strange to believe.”), but K-Ming Chang blurs that line so much that the fantastical things that happen (and there are a lot) feel neither invasive nor haunting. None of the characters seem thrown off by anything that’s going on, which made it really hard to know if and how much any of it was meant to be symbolic. If none of it, then why was no one like, “Woah, brother and dad just flew into the air like kites!” or “Omg, a blinding light and rabbit just came out of Agong’s crotch!”?
It also doesn’t help that Chang felt the need to try and be gritty by using vulgar imagery. I don’t take offense to penises, vaginas, and bodily fluids, but there really was an over-reliance on these things.
Ma says, the gold will stay buried and we’ll have fed all we own to the trees that grow moss like pubic hair.
you’re born in an opposite city, a place where the only reliable rain is your piss
Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning.
I meant to sew all the yard-holes closed, but they bred behind my back: I couldn’t guess what was fucking them.
Some say his balls were big enough to shoot out of cannons. I knew a man like that back on the island. He had a fishpenis and had to live waist-down in water. If he waded onto land, it’d breathe the air and die. All the other fishermen held their breathe to blow him.
Today the crotch of my underwear is a landscape painting. The landscape is mud for miles; cleft-ass mountains’ cloudturds.
The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum.
Creative? Sure, but it gets old when everything is likened to a body part or function. She sees nipples in cactuses, penises in hoses, and anuses in wrinkly faces. The stars are ejaculate, someone pisses and poops snakes, etc.
Often times, it didn’t even work.
One night when the moon was as brown as a nipple,…
It’s summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks, like that time you were sick and threw up into your pillowcase…
We miss the fields fizzing with our piss, the taro we raised behind the church, the rain fucking our mouths full of a sky’s salt.
The rain like diarrhea, brown and sizzling…
Back when warplanes had anuses that dilated open and shat dung-bombs, spraying a diarrhea that scarred your skin.
Nipple-moons, vomit/diarrhea/phallic rain, and dilating warplane anuses all just feel so off the mark. Which is a shame, because elsewhere Chang does show a certain aptitude for description:
Your grandmother’s grief has grown its own body. She raises it like another child, one she loves better than me and my sister, one that can never leave her.
On the plane, I slept with my head leaning against my mother’s and woke with the sun running like a yolk across the sky. Buildings toothpicked the sky.
Even this one, despite being yet another butt metaphor, is actually clever and deep (heh-heh):
I don’t believe bodies are born as wholes. We aren’t born anything but holes, throats and anuses and pores: ways of being entered and left.
The odd/crude figurative language isn’t the only problem, though. All the surrealism buries what is meant to be the main plot; the tiger spirit/tail element felt largely absent, and I can’t even recall Ben having any “strange powers.” Additionally, the characters were not very distinct, especially the mother and daughter. They have their own chapters and topics, so it’s not that you forget who is who, but they just sound like the same perspective (less so for the grandma).
Chang has fun with language, using play-on words, homophones, and (ironically) literal understandings of figurative language.
The Sunday school teacher called to tell Ma about Jie’s carnal appetite, but Ma misheard penis as peanuts and said no, Jie doesn’t have allergies.
Americans freeze everything, I said, and when she asked why, I said it was because their mouths were probably microwaves.
It’s called a strip mall for a reason, my mother said. Learn to take off everything but your gloves.
It works well to the extent that it’s entertaining, but it is supposed demonstrate something more? Satirization of American culture/consumerism? The fluidity of language? Without knowing the symbolism or commentary, lines like those were just mildly amusing punchlines.
So what is supposed to be the takeaway? I guess it’s supposed to be about identity —as women, immigrants, and queer— but she was so focused on characters pissing themselves and coating everything in obscure language that those themes don’t really stand out.
And Lastly, for a book about Taiwanese women, the book didn’t do a great job of demonstrating that. Other than one scene with the convenience store clerk (more than halfway through the book), they don’t even call it that. Everywhere else in the novel, the characters refer to Taiwan as the “island” and China as the “mainland.” What’s up with that?
As I was reading the book, I kept telling myself that, despite the convoluted surrealism, I could give it three stars, but by the time I finished I honestly couldn't say more than “It was okay,” and now that I've finished this review I can't really recall much about it that I liked... so I'm going with one star. Perhaps my real rating would be 1.5 stars. Goodreads user Hsinju Chen wrote a great review going in depth about some of the ways Chang played with language, so go read that if you want to see how much thought went into the work.
*(Other) Book Club February Pick*
Now, about that synopsis: It promises “Three generations of Taiwanese American women… haunted by the myths of their homeland,” a tiger spirit, mysterious holes spitting up letters from the girl’s grandma (Ama), and a lesbian romance with a neighborhood girl “with strange powers of her own.”
What you really get, however, is a tangle of myths and family history with an aimless plot, oversaturated in figurative language. I understand that magical realism is meant to blur the lines between fantasy and reality (I like Matthew Strecher’s definition: a “realistic setting… invaded by something too strange to believe.”), but K-Ming Chang blurs that line so much that the fantastical things that happen (and there are a lot) feel neither invasive nor haunting. None of the characters seem thrown off by anything that’s going on, which made it really hard to know if and how much any of it was meant to be symbolic. If none of it, then why was no one like, “Woah, brother and dad just flew into the air like kites!” or “Omg, a blinding light and rabbit just came out of Agong’s crotch!”?
It also doesn’t help that Chang felt the need to try and be gritty by using vulgar imagery. I don’t take offense to penises, vaginas, and bodily fluids, but there really was an over-reliance on these things.
Ma says, the gold will stay buried and we’ll have fed all we own to the trees that grow moss like pubic hair.
you’re born in an opposite city, a place where the only reliable rain is your piss
Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning.
I meant to sew all the yard-holes closed, but they bred behind my back: I couldn’t guess what was fucking them.
Some say his balls were big enough to shoot out of cannons. I knew a man like that back on the island. He had a fishpenis and had to live waist-down in water. If he waded onto land, it’d breathe the air and die. All the other fishermen held their breathe to blow him.
Today the crotch of my underwear is a landscape painting. The landscape is mud for miles; cleft-ass mountains’ cloudturds.
The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum.
Creative? Sure, but it gets old when everything is likened to a body part or function. She sees nipples in cactuses, penises in hoses, and anuses in wrinkly faces. The stars are ejaculate, someone pisses and poops snakes, etc.
Often times, it didn’t even work.
One night when the moon was as brown as a nipple,…
It’s summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks, like that time you were sick and threw up into your pillowcase…
We miss the fields fizzing with our piss, the taro we raised behind the church, the rain fucking our mouths full of a sky’s salt.
The rain like diarrhea, brown and sizzling…
Back when warplanes had anuses that dilated open and shat dung-bombs, spraying a diarrhea that scarred your skin.
Nipple-moons, vomit/diarrhea/phallic rain, and dilating warplane anuses all just feel so off the mark. Which is a shame, because elsewhere Chang does show a certain aptitude for description:
Your grandmother’s grief has grown its own body. She raises it like another child, one she loves better than me and my sister, one that can never leave her.
On the plane, I slept with my head leaning against my mother’s and woke with the sun running like a yolk across the sky. Buildings toothpicked the sky.
Even this one, despite being yet another butt metaphor, is actually clever and deep (heh-heh):
I don’t believe bodies are born as wholes. We aren’t born anything but holes, throats and anuses and pores: ways of being entered and left.
The odd/crude figurative language isn’t the only problem, though. All the surrealism buries what is meant to be the main plot; the tiger spirit/tail element felt largely absent, and I can’t even recall Ben having any “strange powers.” Additionally, the characters were not very distinct, especially the mother and daughter. They have their own chapters and topics, so it’s not that you forget who is who, but they just sound like the same perspective (less so for the grandma).
Chang has fun with language, using play-on words, homophones, and (ironically) literal understandings of figurative language.
The Sunday school teacher called to tell Ma about Jie’s carnal appetite, but Ma misheard penis as peanuts and said no, Jie doesn’t have allergies.
Americans freeze everything, I said, and when she asked why, I said it was because their mouths were probably microwaves.
It’s called a strip mall for a reason, my mother said. Learn to take off everything but your gloves.
It works well to the extent that it’s entertaining, but it is supposed demonstrate something more? Satirization of American culture/consumerism? The fluidity of language? Without knowing the symbolism or commentary, lines like those were just mildly amusing punchlines.
So what is supposed to be the takeaway? I guess it’s supposed to be about identity —as women, immigrants, and queer— but she was so focused on characters pissing themselves and coating everything in obscure language that those themes don’t really stand out.
And Lastly, for a book about Taiwanese women, the book didn’t do a great job of demonstrating that. Other than one scene with the convenience store clerk (more than halfway through the book), they don’t even call it that. Everywhere else in the novel, the characters refer to Taiwan as the “island” and China as the “mainland.” What’s up with that?
As I was reading the book, I kept telling myself that, despite the convoluted surrealism, I could give it three stars, but by the time I finished I honestly couldn't say more than “It was okay,” and now that I've finished this review I can't really recall much about it that I liked... so I'm going with one star. Perhaps my real rating would be 1.5 stars. Goodreads user Hsinju Chen wrote a great review going in depth about some of the ways Chang played with language, so go read that if you want to see how much thought went into the work.
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