![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() More mysterious happenings follow, each linked with tokens of wisdom or fantastical myths from mother and grandmother. The daughter grows a tail, and believes she is the conduit for the tiger spirit. While there are multiple stories that transform Bestiary, the tale of Hu Gu Po, a tiger spirit that inhabits a woman’s body and sustains her form by feeding her hunger with children (especially their peanut toes), is one that sparks pivotal change. Spanning the perspectives of three generations - the unnamed grandmother, mother and daughter - of Taiwanese-American women, Bestiary explores tales of mythical creatures and stories that bind these women together. They are sharp and precise, as though carved with the precision of a chef’s knife, and at no point can you predict the magic Chang is trying to bring to life. Every paragraph is coated, made heavy with vivid imagery. ![]() Chang’s debut novel fits firmly in the genre of magic realism, folding in mythical stories and fantastical moments that physically manifest in her characters’ lives. But I quickly found that I was very wrong. In the first chapter of K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary, I got the sense it would be similar to C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills are Gold, about a diasporic family’s survival and hunt for gold. ![]()
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