A poetic collection of short stories which look at myth and magical realism - some more challenging than others!

Intriguing selection from the stories that at the first glance might come across as strange.
Despite them being so short, author has managed to tell so much withing those lines, that reader is able to understand the whole complexity of the picture.
However the issue that I found with majority of the stories, I could not concentrate and follow those stories, and they did not make much sense.

This is a really exciting short story collection very much looking at mythology and looking at queer identity and the immigrant experience. What I really liked about this book is that it's not afraid to dabble immensely in magical realism and thinking about mythmaking and how that is portrayed through the themes.

Its divided into three sections - Mothers , Myths and Moths. It's looking at motherhood and also thinking about communal storytelling and expanding the boundaries of what is real and what is not , through myth and the collective storytelling that is passed down through myth. it focuses a lot of ghosts and grieving. This book is very much rooted in the body and bodily functions and thinking about what it means to occupy a body while also expanding that idea through not being afraid to think about the body in more mythical ways or more abstract ways.

This book was incredibly challenging for me to read in that I am not familiar with reading a lot of magical realism or myth and it was really fun to see the boundaries of short storytelling to be widened for me as a reader. If you are looking for queer magical realism poetic short stories, this is one for you.

Gods of Want is a collection of short stories from the author of Bestiary, exploring Taiwanese American life, magical realism, family, and queer sexuality. There's lots of hauntings of family and the past, strange characters coming and going, and narrators who don't quite feel like they fit in these stories, which are often poetic with a hypnotic sense of language and storytelling. In particular, there's a lot of mothers, aunts, and other women having an influence on younger female narrators, and reading the collection as a whole, there's a lot of interesting things to think about in terms of women and families, as well as ways in which stories are real and unreal. Some of the stories gripped me less than others, as with many collections, but there's plenty to experience in God of Want.

Gods of Want is an odd one. I knew I’d like it, because I loved Bestiary, but I think something about K-Ming Chang’s short fiction didn’t work for me in the same way. And it’s something I can’t quite put my finger on, so this is about to be a very short review. It’s entirely possible it was just down to my mood reading it. I seem to be in some kind of slump where nothing really gets above a three star rating for me, which I think is me rather than the books (although who can say). Basically, I’m just going to chalk this rating up to “it’s not you it’s me”. Anyone who liked K-Ming Chang’s other works will probably like this just as much. Maybe if I’d have picked it up at a different time, I would have too.