Bestiary
A Novel
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3.8 • 11 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • 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.
“Gorgeous and gorgeously grotesque . . . Every line of this sensuous, magical-realist marvel is utterly alive.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews
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 afterward, 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.
Praise for Bestiary
“[A] vivid, fabulist debut . . . the prose is full of imagery. Chang’s wild story of a family’s tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.”—Publishers Weekly
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Author K-Ming Chang’s gifts as an award-winning poet are on full display in her debut novel, a captivating and gorgeous tale about three unforgettable women that explores themes of family, culture, and myth. As the book’s narrators—simply called Grandmother, Mother, and Daughter—strive to reconcile their Taiwanese identities with their lives in America, Chang weaves in stunning touches of magical realism. We love how she brings literal elements of Chinese and Taiwanese folktales into the real world, as when Daughter sprouts a tiger’s tail and the girl she’s crushing on seems more and more like a bird. Chang even threads important ideas about ethnic stereotypes and abusive marriages into this multilayered story. Bestiary is a transcendent look at how the struggles that make us human are the same ones that make us magical.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Chang's vivid, fabulist debut, three generations of women contend with the mythology of their Taiwanese heritage. Chang opens in 1980, with Mother as a young girl searching for the gold her father brought from mainland China to Taiwan to Arkansas, then flashes forward to present-day California, where Mother raises Daughter on a steady stream of legends, such as that of Hu Gu Po, a tiger spirit who wants to be human but must consume the toes of children to keep her form. (Some of Mother's toes are missing.) Daughter takes the story of Hu Gu Po as her own when she grows a tiger tail from a wound on her back, the result of a whipping Mother gave her and her brother for digging holes in their front yard. When Daughter befriends a classmate from China, the girls explore their desire for each other, as the holes in her front yard spit up letters that seem to be written by Daughter's grandmother, leaving it up to Daughter to make sense of her lineage. The narrative arc meanders through the characters' various relationships, but the prose is full of imagery. Chang's wild story of a family's tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.
