Hey everyone.

I hope everyone has been doing well these days. I know it’s been pretty touch and go there for me personally and I’m not quite back here yet, but I figured I’d do a somewhat easy meme to start off the week. For those of you who know what’s the what, I appreciate your kind words. I’ll keep you posted on when I hear more.

Thanks to Dini @ Dini Panda Reads, I’m adding Goodreads Monday to my weekly meme schedule, and I’m excited to do this one. This weekly meme was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners and it invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it.

Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets.

One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth–and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.

With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.

I’ve been seeing this book show up on my feed more and more lately, and I think I’ve even received some emails about it. It already intrigues me with the generational aspect of the story, and the fact that it’s about a Taiwanese-American family. It also is super queer, which I love a lot because I really like that there’s more books that deal with queer identities. I also like that there’s magical realism involved in this. I like books that have some magical realism in it, and some of my favorite books in the past couple of years have been considered magical realism. It kind of makes me wish that there was some sort of magic in our world, you know? Especially right now.

I ended up getting the book on Libro.fm so I can listen to it. I’ll have to try to listen to it somewhat soon?

So this has been out for less than a month already but I’ve seen such high reviews of it already, which I’m so glad for. Have you already read this? Is this on your radar? What are your thoughts on magical realism? Let’s talk about it.