A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing

Review

This novel combined three elements that I love to read about: history, folklore, and family sagas. Much of the history was brutal and horrific, but I really enjoyed how the structure of the novel mirrored Qianze's experience uncovering the secrets and trauma of her family.

A lesson he had learned: his past resisted chronology. It looped. It wound. It spiraled like a Fibonacci sequence. Some ages felt closer to him than others. Multiples of seven, he'd noticed, consumed him, felt uncomfortably, inexplicably real. Fourteen. Twenty-one. Thirty-five. He did not know why. What he also knew: his mind coiled, serpentine, suffocating those memories he most wanted to forget — the same ones he now needed.