Her most recent books are Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries and Philology’s Vomit: An Essay on the Immortality and Corporeality of Texts (both 2017). Even though the grandmother's letters were original in structure and relevant to the plot, I didn't fully capture its essence. This exhibition, the first ever dedicated to the bestiary, gathers together more than a hundred works from institutions across the United States and Europe, including one-third of the world’s surviving illuminated bestiaries.

Packed with incredible facts and jaw-dropping insights into wildlife ecology, anatomy and behaviour, it is a genuine delight. While this is a very bold choice, and often used to make the reader feel deeply connected with the protagonist, I felt the overly poetic style of writing clashed with the first person narrative, bringing a disconnect and almost making us feel that the protagonist isn't real.Thank you to my Goodreads friends whom I polled and was assured by that it was okay to not finish an ARC!

Throughout it all, the lyrical serenity of the prose feels at odds with the unflinching violence that it captures—it’s discomfiting.Join Book of Beasts curators Elizabeth Morrison and Larisa Grollemond as they give a special walkthrough of the exhibition on Facebook Live. Violence is not one-dimensional in Bestiary; Chang doesn't excuse it, especially when it takes place between the family members, but she has her narrators contextualize it in their stories, reaching back through memories dressed up with myths to find the beauty that coexists with hurt and trauma.