Image: The cover of the book has a background composed of a close-up of the blue human iris, the pupil encircled by the title of the book in yellow letters. To the right of the eye, partially obscuring it, is a black and yellow illustration of a woman looking towards the center of the cover. A tan assymetrical oval shape is at the bottom of the iris with Aina Hunter's name in red stenciled letters. The bottom of the cover is a red background with the book's byline- the inevitable nigrescence of charlotte-noa tibbit- in black and yellow letters.
I am going to break with my usual process and begin this review of Aina Hunter's Charlotte and the Chickenman with an excerpt from the publisher's about section as I believe it captures the feel of this book well:
Whisk(e)y Tit attempts to restore degradation and degeneracy to the literary arts. We are unwilling to sacrifice intellectual rigour, unrelenting playfulness, and visual beauty, often leading to texts that would otherwise be abandoned in a homogenised literary landscape. In a world gone mad, our refusal to make this sacrifice is an act of civil service and civil disobedience alike, and our work reflects this.
I originally delayed writing this review so that I could include thoughts from when Hunter kindly joined VINE Book Club to discuss the text. Afterward, I delayed writing it again to figure out how I wanted to write about it. I am not sure if it is due to my medically foggy mind or if I am just not sharp enough to grasp things, but it took me a very long time- almost to the end of the book- to realize that it was going backward in time. I believe this is on me as others in the book club seemed to have figured it out sooner. Due to this, the book did not seem to match the description- which I was very excited about reading. However, I still found it fascinating in the ways I experienced it.
In my head, this book read as if a prompt for writing about a character was handed to several different people with several different writing styles, instructing them to each write about the protagonist using a different genre and time period. I don't think I have ever read anything like this before and the experience ranged from being engrossed in fascinating dialogue across an... unconventional dinner table to the batshit descriptions of sperm bots and dairy cows. Hunter's ability to write from different genres, perspectives, dialects, and more was impressive and engaging.
This book is also very Queer and species inclusive, which was not a surprise based on the description. I really enjoyed the unique and bizarre ways the author navigated these realms. In discussion with the book club, I found Aina Hunter to be very candid, vulnerable, humble, and willing to put a lot of thought into her answers to every question we asked.
Throughout the group, we learned that Hunter never intended to write scifi in the first place and that she does not read it much. To get that kind of fresh composition was also interesting. Hunter also told us about how the reverse chronology was a decision made late in the writing process rather than beforehand. I want to say, for those of us who aren't quite as quick witted, I wish there would have been a clearer way of marking the time in which each chapter took place. Would that take away from the avant-garde style of the book and the delightfully wild mission statement from the publisher? I am not sure.
I have deliberately left out most details of the story as the description already conveys a lot to the reader and due to the choppiness, I fear I would spoil things. This book was definitely a wild ride that I enjoyed going on and it gave me a lot to think about- not just about the story itself but about what fiction writing could be on a wider scale.
This was also posted to my goodreads.
cool
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