I went in cold, as is my preference, and really struggled for the first 80 pages until the title chapter "Bestiary" which began to really hook me in. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a contemporary bestiary of sorts, the Book of Imaginary Beings, which collects imaginary beasts from bestiaries and fiction.

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. Though there is a lot of poetic language, this was a difficult to read for me- a little too gross for my taste like mother eating her daughter’s earwax and too much focus on boldly functions. A volucrary is a similar collection of the symbols of birds that is sometimes found in conjunction with bestiaries.The unicorn became one of the most beloved animals in art of the period, largely due to its connection to Christ. It’s as if you found yourself imagining the stories you might have overheard of past family members you never got to meet. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her estranged grandmother; a visiting aunt leaves red on everything she touches; a ghost bird shimmers in an ancient birdcage. The author describes it as "part migration story, part mythological retelling, part queer love story. With animals being a part of religion before bestiaries and their lessons came out, they were influenced by past observations of meaning as well as older civilizations and their interpretations.

This fidelity to a particular set of images is relatively rare, setting the illuminating practice in the bestiary tradition apart from other manuscript genres in Europe during the Middle Ages. This reflected the belief that the world itself was the Word of God and that every living thing had its own special meaning. The bestiary also provided the basis for the emerging field of natural history in the late Middle Ages and established a far-reaching legacy that still impacts the visual arts today.Some descriptions explained an animal’s Christian significance, such as the unicorn as a symbol for Christ, while others focused on physical characteristics.