Reviews tagging 'War'

Bestiary, by K-Ming Chang

5 reviews

readingjaunt's review

5.0

I’ve never read a book with so much pissing in it

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual harassment, Animal death, Child abuse, Suicidal thoughts, Dementia, Animal cruelty, Body horror, Excrement, Sexual assault, War, Domestic abuse, Gore, Blood, and Violence

maksipad's review

challenging emotional slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I like weird books and this fits in that category for sure. The prose was absolutely beautiful and I really loved the story. However, it was also fairly slow and I could only read small chunks of the book before I had to put it back down for awhile. Also, as others have mentioned, there are manyyy bodily function references.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Excrement, Abandonment, War, Xenophobia, Violence, Suicide attempt, Sexual violence, Rape, Pregnancy, Physical abuse, Animal death, Blood, Child abuse, Dementia, and Gun violence

Moderate: Gore, Vomit, Murder, and Injury/injury detail

svmreads's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness, Violence, Blood, Emotional abuse, Injury/injury detail, Gun violence, War, and Dementia

porge_grewe's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional funny lighthearted reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

 This is a difficult one to review. How do you rate such a well-crafted, interesting, good book which requires such a strong stomach to get through? Much of this book is unpleasant – deliberately and skilfully unpleasant – and that will put a lot of readers off. If you click with the style, however, or if you dial in to the point where it is no longer overwhelming, you will be rewarded with a thoughtful, funny, sad, and true book. 

Bestiary is about a lot of things. The points of view K-Ming Chang uses, following three generations of a family emigrating from Taiwan to the United States, provide a focus on family, bodies, love, and myth-making, and, through these, more varied discussion of warfare, domestic violence, abject poverty, queer love and experience, growing up, legacy, land and belonging, and all sort of other topics. Chang, or rather her characters, consider all these using a style which moves between a straightforward, child-like simplicity and poetic surrealism, often melding the two to provide a bizarre, child’s-eye-view of a mundane world, or perhaps a sober, adult view of a magical one. In many ways, this feels most like a book about magic. Not pretty magic, and not necessarily magic in which any of the protagonists actually want to engage, but magic nonetheless. It would put me in mind of a mix of Helen Oyeyemi’s What is Not Yours is Not Yours and Stephen Graham Jones’ Mongrels if Bestiary did not feel so much its own creation. 

A large part of this individual identity for Bestiary come from its view of the world. Chang renders the world as elements and animals and bodies – Different members of the family are salt or rivers or earth or birds or fish or tigers at various points and the physicality of bodies, their orifices, and the many and various fluids which those orifices dribble, leak, and squirt are fundamentally interwoven into their experience of the world, their histories, and each other. Again, this will be too much for some, perhaps many, readers, but it creates a truly human, animal way of being in the world in which the books more mythological and folkloric elements take shape and marinate. In that way, I have seen few more resonant depictions of childhood. 

Massive kudos also to Jinhwa Jang for making one of the most striking and fitting covers I have seen in a while. 

This is a grimy, beautiful, abrasive, feral, wise book and if you feel you have the constitution for it then I strongly recommend trying it out. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Domestic abuse and Excrement

Moderate: War and Racism

stevie's review

challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Abandonment, Abortion, Adult/minor relationship, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Blood, Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Colonisation, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Excrement, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Gore, Grief, Injury/injury detail, Medical content, Miscarriage, War, Vomit, Violence, Torture, Suicide attempt, Sexual violence, Sexual content, Sexism, Racism, Pregnancy, Physical abuse, and Misogyny