From the familiar to the improbable, the gross to the endearing, The Modern Bestiary is a compendium of curious creatures. in " The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly " Publishing This Week" newsletter.

cannot get rid of the influence of generational influence and heredity, battling off all those myths. in many ways the novel feels like a spiral – told primarily through the daughter’s attempts to understand her mother, her tayal grandmother and the aunts she doesn’t know, but also the wildness inside of her and ben, the girl she loves. I very much enjoyed the moral of the story and the subjective footnotes but I think that I didn't dig deep enough, hence this book is worth a re-read. The Modern Bestiary provides a fascinating, accessible and humorous insight into the wonders of the natural world.

I didn't read this novel so much as become immersed in it, a jungle filled with surprises, countless moments of desire and pain and light. Many decide to make their own bestiary with their own observations including knowledge from previous ones. It's fitting, then, that K-Ming Chang's debut novel is titled Bestiary, for it too is a compendium of real and mythical beasts — some human, some animal, most a bit of both — that roam through a family's lineage and the stories its members tell each other from one generation to another.

The use of graphic bodily secretions and icky anatomy was excessive and I found it to be frankly way too distracting.

Employing a variety of styles and shifting POVs, there's nothing straightforward in Bestiary, but I was captivated by these characters and their lives; dazzled by the language. I wanted to bring a similar playful energy, and in the novel, I tried experimenting with form by incorporating footnotes, vignettes, and oral histories, creating a queer and matriarchal story in which the narrator doesn’t necessarily need to look to the “outside” world for what’s possible – rather, she grapples with what she’s inherited, deciding what lineages she wants to be a part of. In addition, the well-known characteristics associated with numerous beasts—the unicorn, the elephant, and the fox, among others—were effortlessly appropriated for secular works made for the elite realm of the court.