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juffnstuff's review against another edition
3.75
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual assault, Cursing, Suicide, Animal death, and Vomit
anna_23's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
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? It's complicated
5.0
5/5☆
Once I began reading "Gods of Want", I quickly was pulled in by descriptions like "(...) my wife said what we needed was an evacuation. She was always speaking in the vocabulary of storms, of evacuations and casualties and degrees of damage. She had the spine of a storm too: There was a stillness to her center, but her limbs churned the air, choreographing wreckage wherever she went. At night I liked to wake up and watch her wrestle with her own skin, snaking all over the bed, navigating the night into her mouth and eating it."
I just loved the way Chang was able to use aspects of nature, the body, food, religion or even aspects that go past our understanding of reality and create these beautiful and vivid images that stuck with me.
When I found out that the author was also a poet, I was not in the least surprised. Outside of the writing being beautiful and poetic, I felt a lot of the stories were set up the way poems are. Focusing more on the language and images the poet can create than plot or characters, also flowing seamlessly from things happening in the past to the present. Also Chang played with form the way you often see in poetry collections, 'Auntland' for instance being written without paragraph breaks giving the story a beautiful rhythm and the Aunts a vivid and collective voice.
While I think it's important to find a focus when you have so few pages, which K-Ming Chang did, by giving us this beautiful world of words, that doesn't mean that the characters and plot weren't a joy to also explore.
I know that some of the characters that inhabited these stories, will stay with me for a while. The daughter-in-law in 'Xífù' for her sassy and funny voice while being reluctantly compassionate towards her mother in law, the cousins in 'The Chorus of Dead Cousins' and Mariela in 'Mariela' for how unhinged they were and Mei in 'Nüwa' for her being so daring even when the world is clearly trying to scare her at every turn and many, many more. (I'm not sure why I phrased this like an award show lol)
Because the stories were part of Magical Realism and Chang played with what is real and what isn't, I had so much fun reading on, to see what wild thing will happen next.
In general, I loved how K-Ming Chang took risks and just got fun and creative with her writing. I can't tell you the amount of times I just sat there and thought 'How do you even come up with that?' Like in the story 'Resident Aliens' where Chang saw acid reflux in real life and took that and let the narrator use it as a hair removing tool which she then sold at school to the other girls. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense, so let me just give you the passage. 'To dilute the acid in her spit, the seventeenth widow swigged from a smoothie of baking soda and water, said she was trying to become basic, said that the only time she had kissed a man, his molars dissolved and later his tongue required skin grafts from his ass. One time I asked the seventeenth widow to spit in a jar for me. (...) Later, I stirred a tablespoon of her viscous spit into my bathwater, wanting to know what it was like to burn, and when I got out of the shower I had no more hair anywhere and my mother saw me and said I'd gone bald as a peanut, bald as when I was born. I sold her acidic spit to the girls at school as a form of body hair remover (...)'
There were some objects and images that kept reappearing throughout the story like teeth, melons, water and insects. Outside of being like little fun easter eggs, I found they often added another layer to the themes explored throughout the whole collection.
And finally, I appreciated how the stories let queer Taiwanese-American women be flawed, gross, angry, soft and all the other complexities that encompass them. In some stories, imagining a space for them for their love, passion, desire and all their wants without being weighed down by all the constraints of a patriarchal and heteronormative society. Which combined with the importance of myth in the collection was incredibly beautiful and hopeful, underlying how important myths always were for people to imagine a different world.
And in others exploring those constraints, which was incredibly done in the story 'Resident Aliens'. While always putting women and their relationships with each other, whether it is romantic, platonic or familial, in the forefront of the collection.
My favorite stories were: 'Auntland'; 'The Chorus of Dead Cousins'; 'Nüwa'; 'Nine- Headed Birds'; 'Resident Aliens' and 'Virginia Slims'.
I could go on and on about how much I adored this collection, but at the end I would like to add some passages that stood out to me so you can experience K-Ming Chang's incredible craft yourself:
'The twentieth widow was newly a widow: She said her husband had died in a war, though she couldn't remember which war, only that it was fought using weapons that were wielded by the tongue- miniature knives and bullets that had to be spat- and he finally died one night after biting off his own tongue and releasing it alive in a river, where it became a freshwater eel.' (From Resident Aliens)
'I explained to her, We don't touch the death directly. We do portraits and look at when you were most beautiful. She asked me if I could take her death portrait, and I said we didn't have a camera.
That's okay, she said. Just look at me. Really hard. Remember when I looked like this. Knuckle to knuckle in the crawl space, I looked at her a long time, at the mouth that I kissed, once and only in the dark, before she turned her head away and said we shouldn't be doing this, her father was in bed somewhere above us, and he could hear through the plumbing, he recruited all the sinks to be his ears, so I turned away too and pretended I hadn't started it, hadn't asked her to see her crawl space in the first place, which was really for tornadoes, even though there were no tornadoes here, only earthquakes, and in an earthquake we'd definitely be dead, our spines crushed and scooped up like sugar, and when I shut my eyes and opened them again, I said, There, I've taken it, your face. She said, Good, and told me that when she died, we wouldn't have to touch. I would only have to unzip my eyes and formulate her face in this dark. '(From Nüwa)
'I had an aunt who died in a drunk-driving accident, in a sober-driving accident, in a suicide, in a typhoon, in the middle of the day while blow-drying her hair, in the evening while opening a window, in the morning while hiking to the family grave, in an attempt to get away from her husband, in an attempt to get away from her father, in an attempt to leave the country, in an attempt to get into another one, in an attempt to get her nose done, in an attempt to love a son, in an attempt to outrun a river, in an attempt to reincarnate as rain.' (Auntland)
Trigger Warnings: Mainly for Death, Grief, Gore, Violence, Blood, Homophobia and slightly for Sexual Assault, Suicide, Racism, Domestic Abuse
I recommend the book for:
-Readers of 'Sorrowland' by Rivers Solomon and 'Spirits Abroad' by Zen Cho
-Viewers of 'I May Destroy You' (TV Show, 2021), 'After My Death' (Movie, 2017), 'Where We Belong' (Movie, 2019)
-Listeneners of Music by SASAMI, Haley Heynderickx and Rio Romero
Once I began reading "Gods of Want", I quickly was pulled in by descriptions like "(...) my wife said what we needed was an evacuation. She was always speaking in the vocabulary of storms, of evacuations and casualties and degrees of damage. She had the spine of a storm too: There was a stillness to her center, but her limbs churned the air, choreographing wreckage wherever she went. At night I liked to wake up and watch her wrestle with her own skin, snaking all over the bed, navigating the night into her mouth and eating it."
I just loved the way Chang was able to use aspects of nature, the body, food, religion or even aspects that go past our understanding of reality and create these beautiful and vivid images that stuck with me.
When I found out that the author was also a poet, I was not in the least surprised. Outside of the writing being beautiful and poetic, I felt a lot of the stories were set up the way poems are. Focusing more on the language and images the poet can create than plot or characters, also flowing seamlessly from things happening in the past to the present. Also Chang played with form the way you often see in poetry collections, 'Auntland' for instance being written without paragraph breaks giving the story a beautiful rhythm and the Aunts a vivid and collective voice.
While I think it's important to find a focus when you have so few pages, which K-Ming Chang did, by giving us this beautiful world of words, that doesn't mean that the characters and plot weren't a joy to also explore.
I know that some of the characters that inhabited these stories, will stay with me for a while. The daughter-in-law in 'Xífù' for her sassy and funny voice while being reluctantly compassionate towards her mother in law, the cousins in 'The Chorus of Dead Cousins' and Mariela in 'Mariela' for how unhinged they were and Mei in 'Nüwa' for her being so daring even when the world is clearly trying to scare her at every turn and many, many more. (I'm not sure why I phrased this like an award show lol)
Because the stories were part of Magical Realism and Chang played with what is real and what isn't, I had so much fun reading on, to see what wild thing will happen next.
In general, I loved how K-Ming Chang took risks and just got fun and creative with her writing. I can't tell you the amount of times I just sat there and thought 'How do you even come up with that?' Like in the story 'Resident Aliens' where Chang saw acid reflux in real life and took that and let the narrator use it as a hair removing tool which she then sold at school to the other girls. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense, so let me just give you the passage. 'To dilute the acid in her spit, the seventeenth widow swigged from a smoothie of baking soda and water, said she was trying to become basic, said that the only time she had kissed a man, his molars dissolved and later his tongue required skin grafts from his ass. One time I asked the seventeenth widow to spit in a jar for me. (...) Later, I stirred a tablespoon of her viscous spit into my bathwater, wanting to know what it was like to burn, and when I got out of the shower I had no more hair anywhere and my mother saw me and said I'd gone bald as a peanut, bald as when I was born. I sold her acidic spit to the girls at school as a form of body hair remover (...)'
There were some objects and images that kept reappearing throughout the story like teeth, melons, water and insects. Outside of being like little fun easter eggs, I found they often added another layer to the themes explored throughout the whole collection.
And finally, I appreciated how the stories let queer Taiwanese-American women be flawed, gross, angry, soft and all the other complexities that encompass them. In some stories, imagining a space for them for their love, passion, desire and all their wants without being weighed down by all the constraints of a patriarchal and heteronormative society. Which combined with the importance of myth in the collection was incredibly beautiful and hopeful, underlying how important myths always were for people to imagine a different world.
And in others exploring those constraints, which was incredibly done in the story 'Resident Aliens'. While always putting women and their relationships with each other, whether it is romantic, platonic or familial, in the forefront of the collection.
My favorite stories were: 'Auntland'; 'The Chorus of Dead Cousins'; 'Nüwa'; 'Nine- Headed Birds'; 'Resident Aliens' and 'Virginia Slims'.
I could go on and on about how much I adored this collection, but at the end I would like to add some passages that stood out to me so you can experience K-Ming Chang's incredible craft yourself:
'The twentieth widow was newly a widow: She said her husband had died in a war, though she couldn't remember which war, only that it was fought using weapons that were wielded by the tongue- miniature knives and bullets that had to be spat- and he finally died one night after biting off his own tongue and releasing it alive in a river, where it became a freshwater eel.' (From Resident Aliens)
'I explained to her, We don't touch the death directly. We do portraits and look at when you were most beautiful. She asked me if I could take her death portrait, and I said we didn't have a camera.
That's okay, she said. Just look at me. Really hard. Remember when I looked like this. Knuckle to knuckle in the crawl space, I looked at her a long time, at the mouth that I kissed, once and only in the dark, before she turned her head away and said we shouldn't be doing this, her father was in bed somewhere above us, and he could hear through the plumbing, he recruited all the sinks to be his ears, so I turned away too and pretended I hadn't started it, hadn't asked her to see her crawl space in the first place, which was really for tornadoes, even though there were no tornadoes here, only earthquakes, and in an earthquake we'd definitely be dead, our spines crushed and scooped up like sugar, and when I shut my eyes and opened them again, I said, There, I've taken it, your face. She said, Good, and told me that when she died, we wouldn't have to touch. I would only have to unzip my eyes and formulate her face in this dark. '(From Nüwa)
'I had an aunt who died in a drunk-driving accident, in a sober-driving accident, in a suicide, in a typhoon, in the middle of the day while blow-drying her hair, in the evening while opening a window, in the morning while hiking to the family grave, in an attempt to get away from her husband, in an attempt to get away from her father, in an attempt to leave the country, in an attempt to get into another one, in an attempt to get her nose done, in an attempt to love a son, in an attempt to outrun a river, in an attempt to reincarnate as rain.' (Auntland)
Trigger Warnings: Mainly for Death, Grief, Gore, Violence, Blood, Homophobia and slightly for Sexual Assault, Suicide, Racism, Domestic Abuse
I recommend the book for:
-Readers of 'Sorrowland' by Rivers Solomon and 'Spirits Abroad' by Zen Cho
-Viewers of 'I May Destroy You' (TV Show, 2021), 'After My Death' (Movie, 2017), 'Where We Belong' (Movie, 2019)
-Listeneners of Music by SASAMI, Haley Heynderickx and Rio Romero
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Violence and Gore
Minor: Homophobia, War, Suicide, and Domestic abuse
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