Review: Beware of Chicken 5

Beware of Chicken 5 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A significant improvement over Book 4, in my opinion. There's a sense of progress, albeit slow, throughout, rather than just a lot of slice-of-life eventually giving way to some action most of the way through the book. True, there isn't much actual action, but there is at least the potential for conflict when Jin Ren's adoptive "grandfather," the mighty and terrible cultivator Shin, arrives at the farm with an agenda already in mind that will clash with Jin's settled purpose.

It's also partly a setup book, since near the end two groups of the (many) characters go off on different missions, leaving a third group to keep things going on the farm.

There really are too many characters, and too much backstory (which I find harder to remember than the characters, as I've mentioned in a previous review), but from what little I know about Asian classic literature, sprawling epics with many characters and not a lot of what Westerners would think of as plot are quite normal, so this is, presumably, in tribute to that tradition.

Most of the characters have points of view, and experience some form of personal growth, often because of each other, which is good. There are some touching and amusing side stories at the end of the book. All in all, I enjoyed it.

This series started out poorly edited, but has significantly improved. I did mark a couple of dozen issues, but that's about average even for a book much shorter than this one, in my experience. There are occasional odd phrasings or misused words or fumbled idioms, and a few punctuation stumbles that usually seem more like typos than someone not knowing a convention, but by current standards this is very clean.

I suspect (by the fact that the first five books all seem to be on sale at once) that Book 6 may be about to come out. I look forward to it (though I don't look forwards to it, as the author phrases it a couple of times).

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