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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
holy crap. this book. i don’t even have the right words. beautiful, heartbreaking, gorgeously written. a little confusing because of translation. circular and whole.
i think this is my favorite book i have read this year. absolutely fabulous. so many quotes that could stand alone.
the audiobook narrator absolutely smashed it too. will def need a physical copy to annotate in the future. must read for fantasy and mythology lovers. wow.
i think this is my favorite book i have read this year. absolutely fabulous. so many quotes that could stand alone.
the audiobook narrator absolutely smashed it too. will def need a physical copy to annotate in the future. must read for fantasy and mythology lovers. wow.
Strange Beasts of China imagines a world similar to ours except there are different beasts living among humans (all of them look almost exactly like humans, aside from a few key characteristics). Each chapter focuses on a different beast and almost read like short stories. The "author" (main character) of the book is a dropout cryptozoologist writing stories about these beasts, and she was very intriguing! This book is steeped in metaphor that I probably didn't understand entirely, but it never failed to keep me engaged and thinking.
I went into this expecting more fantasy that social commentary, but I didn't completely mind the direction this went in. Aside from the vagueness surrounding the narrator's history, I found her to have a compelling voice, which could also be attributed to the writing, which was definitely one of the book's strongest points. The eventual story that unwinds throughout the individual stories slowly grew on me, and I enjoyed the narrator's developing relationship with Zhong Liang and her complicated feelings for her mentor. Overall, though, I don't think Strange Beasts of China is successful as a short story collection, or even a novel if one considers it that. The structure of the stories is fundamentally the same, so after the first two, there's nothing surprising: you know the shape of what's going to happen. I'd definitely be up from trying more fiction from Yan Ge, just maybe an actual novel.
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Już sama nie wiem czy lubię czy nie lubię literaturę azjatycką
On the whole I did enjoy this book, it was engaging and heartbreakingly beautiful at times but there seemed to be a lot of plot holes and strange leaps in logic. I think the plot holes and leaps were an intentional aspect of the narrator, to establish the blend of naivety and arrogance that make up her character, but it sometimes clashed with the general tone of the book (which might have been a translation issue, I assume).
Will try again when I'm less likely to cry at everything and have more patience.
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
slow-paced