Walking practice A novel

Min probes themes such as gender and otherness in this provocative if clunky story of an alien trapped on Earth. The unnamed and ungendered narrator, the lone survivor of an attack on their planet, is stranded on Earth with no way of getting home. To cope with their isolation and hunger, they painfully transform their alien body to look human, then engage in random hookups. After sex, they kill and eat their lovers. Throughout this process, they struggle both physically (forcing their body to conform to human standards) and mentally (the repressed guilt of killing to survive). As an outsider, their labor to replicate human traits provides an opportunity for soliloquies about the gender binary and the ways it's policed ("You, dear reader, must be curious about my gender.... Or you might have scraped together clues from what I've said and how I've said it, constructing my gender to your own design"). Underneath, the narrator aches with a desire for connection. Abstract illustrations by Min hint at the narrator's private bodily state, and clever changes in the formatting indicate whether the narrator is in their natural or human form. Though the prose is sometimes stilted, the narrator's earnest struggles with loneliness feel genuine. Despite some missteps, this is worth a look. (Mar.)

An alien arrives on Earth, hungry for love. The narrator of Min's dark satire, first published in South Korea in 2017, is a shape-shifting alien who crash-landed here 15 years ago. In that time, it's sampled all sorts of sustenance on our planet, but only human flesh truly satisfies. So it uses dating apps (username: Hunting4luv) to quell its cravings for sex and sustenance. It's hard work, morphing into attractive male or female forms--Earth's gravity keeps threatening to make its body "puff up like bread in an oven." And sometimes its prey proves elusive, refusing to sit still to have their heads bitten off, their blood sucked completely. But it's all worth it: "If you throw the heart, lungs, entrails, and other organs together and boil them in a pot, it's a killer stew," it winkingly notes. It's easy to identify Min's real-world targets: online dating, body image, gender identity, and the literal alienation of everyday life. But Min's version of a fish out of water is still entertaining and surprising. That's partly because the alien offers an extreme outsider take on courtship and gender rituals. ("To act the part of a woman, you've got to memorize a hefty script. Men should do the opposite. Just don't act like a woman.") Also, Min deploys a brand of sardonic humor--ably conveyed via Caudle's translation--that would be a poor fit for a more realistic novel. (The book is also interspersed with abstract drawings by Min that seem to suggest the creature's true, squishy form.) Despite its murderousness, the narrator is a remarkably sympathetic character. Its laments are ours, especially when we seek connection: "I am beholden to my body's every demand. Dear reader, this is how I live." A slim, sui generis allegory on romance and its discontents. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.