07 Sep / Bestiary by K-Ming Chang [in Booklist]
At almost 19, Ama already has a dead soldier husband and three daughters. She marries two-decades-older Agong, another soldier with whom she has two more daughters. The youngest becomes Mother, who moves with Ama, Agong, and Jie (older sister), from Taiwan to Arkansas, only to be displaced again when the family relocates to California.
Mother marries a Chinese husband (who leaves) and births two children of her own. The eldest, Daughter, turns mythical when she and her brother dig holes in the backyard that morph into hungry portals of (mis)understanding.
Raw, angry, even sneering, Ama, Mother, and Daughter’s three-voiced narrative is often breathtaking: “Ma doesn’t measure her life in years but in languages … Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar.” The agile, abundant beauty of K-Ming Chang’s phrasing, however, is not quite enough to mitigate the relentless abuse, dysfunction, and violence that permeates her debut. Storytelling – lost legends, fairy tales, family lore, cryptic letters – is used to frighten and control, which eventually turns stifling enough to potentially estrange less patient readers.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, August 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020