halfcactus

But first, my vocabulary list/journal doodles~




小蘑菇 Little Mushroom is a post-apocalyptic novel about a future where gene contamination has caused inter-species mutation all over the world. And the more that humans try to keep their biological humanity intact and survive as a species, the less human they become.

I didn't expect this book to be as bleak as it was but in retrospect it's pretty thematic. It pursues the question of "how far are humans willing to go?" wholly and unflinchingly, and it allows you to inhabit an interesting emotional space as the events unfold before the eyes of a mushroom who has absorbed human genes but doesn't experience emotions or attachment the way that humans (and by extension, the novel readers) do. There is some comedy and humor in between all the horror, so it's not horrifying the whole way but it was still terrible, lol.

The visual aspects of the story are beautifully, vividly rendered, but the worldbuilding is pretty shaky so it was hard for me to predict which details would be plot-relevant or not because there were some aspects that seemed like they could be a cause for concern. I did get a better handle on the storytelling style and its themes in the second half (Roses), which had a longer series of intertwined mysteries and plot points that I was very invested in. I liked having the information spread out and revealed ~organically~, but I'm not sure I enjoyed having all the information slowly trickling in only for later chapters to change the rules.(But it's entirely possible that my perspective of time is skewed from only reading 3 chapters at a time...) The high points for me definitely were the action-horror chapters that An Zhe was a part of! They were horrifying, but wonderfully executed.

Vol2 ends at a really good place where it's not a sudden cliffhanger but still leaves you with all the unanswered questions that An Zhe wasn't invested in finding out.

The English translation does really well with scenery and visual details, because it really felt like I was being drawn to the picture that was in the translator's head, and I genuinely enjoyed the first few chapters. But the longer I was reading the more it felt like an initial pass that was meant to be revisited, with lots of the choices in the later portions feeling rough and cursory. It is readable but not the smoothest experience—I felt this most in the dialogue parts, because they were the parts that I found easiest to read in Chinese, but reading them in English didn't feel as easy?

CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror, gore, giant bugs and worms (horrifying), attempted rape, racism/weird depiction of racism at the beginning (not in the English translation)