Late that night, when Daughter wakes up to see her father has left a white kite by their bed — perhaps as a reminder of better times, perhaps as an apology — her brother destroys it, his anger at his father's continued abuse palpable.

Growing up in America, Daughter defines herself through the matrilineal myths of her Taiwanese heritage. One of the main 'animals' mentioned in some of the bestiaries is dragons, which hold much significance in terms of religion and meaning. 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.

Readers who enjoy migration story or mythological retelling or queer love story should give BESTIARY a try. Full of little almost vignette style chapters, Bestiary is a book steeped in imagery and felt surreal. Thank you to my Goodreads friends whom I polled and was assured by that it was okay to not finish an ARC!

bestiary is a remastering of reality wherein humans and nature are never not in conversation with one another. These include Orphic poetry from the past, contemporary musical settings, and bestiary writing from its origins to the present. Every Apollinarian, and every intermedial modernist, will thrill to this superb set of essays in its illumination of cultural co-production as a resonant subject and as a mode of critical enquiry.If you're looking for a literary fiction novel that will shock you, then definitely check out Bestiary.

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. 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. 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.Epic and intimate at once, BESTIARY brings myth to visceral life, showing what becomes of women and girls who carry tigers, birds, and fish within.

Chang knows well that the life of a family-marriage, immigration, queer coming-of-age-can so often feel like a wild and tender myth, being spun and unspun by its members, again and again. H. White's translation of a medieval bestiary in the Cambridge University library; digitized by the University of Wisconsin–Madison libraries. She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife as if auditioning to be its blade. 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. 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.Thank you Netgalley and Random House UK / Vintage for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review. The period of the bestiary’s greatest popularity (1100–1300) corresponded with a movement toward the creation of encyclopedias intended to gather together all knowledge.