A Beast Slinks to Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang absolutely devastated me.

I felt a deep, aching connection to Qianze and her relationship with her father. That constant wondering of who you might have been if someone had stayed, if they had faced their pain instead of running from it. That question lingered through every page.

The generational trauma in this book is overwhelming in the most necessary way. It is a reminder of how brutal the world can be and how often people survive things that history tries to minimize or forget. Set in China beginning in 1924, the novel shows how famine and war shaped nearly every aspect of life. Survival was not heroic. It was desperate.

The shifting timelines are handled beautifully. At first, the connections between past and present feel fragmented, but as the story unfolds, especially through Ming’s life, Weihong’s mother and Qianze’s grandmother, everything begins to click into place. And when it does, it hurts.

Ming’s story made me furious. She is blamed, shamed, and abused for something that was done to her. She was taken as a Japanese comfort woman, raped repeatedly for two years, and when she survives and escapes, the world punishes her again. Her suffering is treated as a moral failure instead of what it truly was, violence inflicted upon her. She is not broken. She is a survivor. And yet she is cast aside.

This book made me feel everything. Anger. Grief. Pain. Frustration. Brief moments of joy and laughter that felt almost defiant in their existence. By the end, my thoughts were a tangled mess, but that feels honest. Some stories are not meant to be neatly processed.

This is one of those books that changes you quietly and permanently. I do not have perfect words for it yet. I am still sitting with it. But I know it is phenomenal.