Will I love Beware of Chicken?

This book does one of my favorite things: deconstructing and reconstructing tropes. It goes ahead and uses Jin, the main character, to critique everything that doesn’t quite make sense in the cultivation subgenre, and then it later uses other characters to validate the same tropes it earlier poked fun at. 

On top of that, the contrast between a relaxed Canadian farmer and his ultra-chuuni “death before dishonor” rooster never fails to be delightful.

It's heartwarming af

I am not being hyperbolic when I say that discovering this fiction changed the course of my life. I found it during a dark time, and the impact it had might be the reason I’m so addicted to reading and writing cozy fantasy. Upon finishing it, I wasn’t ready to leave the world behind, so I fired up the audio and started again. 

This novel is a place of reprieve. A warm hearth I can return to when life gets difficult. And I can’t recommend it enough.

Where Cradle is a homage to cultivation, Beware of Chicken is a subversion that still keeps true to the roots. The story has a hilarious concept where the main character wakes up one day in a cultivator’s body and immediately nopes out of the battle and conflict-riddled world to go farm instead.

It has a lot of puns, humor, and we get to see the main character build a home and life for himself in a new world; and there are a lot of spirit animals around him that become intelligent and keep him company as his strange abilities get… show more.

At first I picked up the book because I thought it’d be a good laugh. I mean, with a title like “Beware of Chicken” how could it not be?

Turns out I was right but it was so much more than that.

As I read I found myself in a slice of life tale about farming. Which normally is not my jam at all. I love action and comedy. Slice of life stuff is just too slow for me. But the story picks up fairly quickly.

You know the cultivation/xianxia trope where some martial artist wants to grow to ultimate… show more.