Beware of Chicken: A Xianxia Cultivation Novel by CasualFarmerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Never was a book more deserving of my Deserves Better Editing tag.
And even though I marked about 80 errors, 80% of those are dialog punctuation, a good many of the rest are putting the apostrophe in the wrong place when the noun is plural, and the remainder are mostly number agreement, narrative tense inconsistency, and straight-up typos. These are not hard to fix (or for the author to learn the simple rules for, so he doesn't make the error in the first place).
Still, 80+ errors keeps it out of the Gold tier of my Best of the Year, which it otherwise would deserve (I consider anything above about a couple of dozen issues to qualify as Seriously Needs Editing).
It's clever. The premise is that a young man from our world (Canadian, like the author), with something of a farming background, is pulled into a xianxia cultivation world in the body of Jin, a low-level disciple of one of the qi cultivation sects, whose heart has just stopped in the course of a beating from his arrogant fellow disciples. Fortunately, since he's an isekai fan and also very even-tempered, this doesn't faze him much; he leaves the monastery with the goal of becoming a farmer somewhere quiet, without much qi, where hopefully arrogant, megalomaniacal cultivators won't bother him too much. A rat race for qi doesn't appeal to him any more than a rat race for money or status. "I had no desire to conquer the world. Eh, rice is more important than that stuff anyways," he says, encapsulating his attitude neatly, and "Why claim the heavens when you can make your own?"
Only once he gets to his remote location and starts his farm, his approach of exchanging qi with the land rather than only taking it (view spoiler) And it makes him much more powerful than he realizes.
There's a lot of good dramatic irony as he's just going cheerfully about the business of farming without being aware of what's happening (he gradually gets wise, but he's always a couple of steps behind events). Some of the time we're in his first-person POV, a normal slangy Canadian young man's voice; some of the time we're in the third-person POV of various other people, including his animals, and the voices are strongly distinct. Their personalities are distinct too; even the two pigs are very different, Chunky (Chun Ki) being happy-go-lucky, soft-hearted and not too bright, while Peppa (Pi Pa) is dainty but formidable.
And underneath it all is what can easily be seen as a satire or parable of extractive capitalism versus a more sustainable approach which appreciates how everything is integrated; damaging one part can damage other parts, and fixing one part can fix other parts, as he puts it when explaining to a (non-awful) cultivator he meets and helps. He also comes to realize (through this person) that though there are plenty of bad actors, not everyone involved in the cultivation system is bad: "I was thinking in good guys and bad guys, but most guys were somewhere in between.... You never hear about the reasonable people. It’s always the caricatures that get the screen time."
It's a warm-hearted, kind story, but it also has tension and conflict. This is managed well by point of view. Jin is always good-hearted and naïve to the point of profound wisdom in his nonviolent approach, but in the other points of view, especially that of Big D (Bi Di) the rooster, we see the farm defended against people of ill will with thrilling martial arts action.
Just as Jin rejects the normal xianxia approach of the world he finds himself in and forges his own path with qi, Casualfarmer refuses to write a made-from-box-mix xianxia/isekai novel while still doing an excellent job with those elements, and so creates something I'm sure is unlike anything else in the genre. (This is the first such novel I've read, but I've looked at enough others to get an idea of what they're normally like.)
It's fully deserving of its large fanbase, and I'm looking forward to the sequel, while also hoping that the author hires a copy editor. Or, if it's already been copy edited, another copy editor.
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