Just from reading the blurb, I had a feeling I was going to love Walking Practice - somehow though, this book still exceeded my expectations! What we have here is 160 pages of pure unadulterated weirdness, packed with twisted humour, clever and relatable character creation, and a quirky and unique commentary on the role of gender in society. There's even room to spare for the bizarre and abstract art style that features throughout this novel, which is not to be missed! As much as I love the character and world Dolki Min has created here, I find myself just as impressed with the Translator Victoria Caudle; this can't have been an easy novel to translate while maintaining it's oddity, and I think the method of changing the typeface to aid character development is inspired. I am honestly sad to have finished Walking Practice, and intend to reread it in the near future!

Dolki Min's Walking Practice is, in some ways, not disssimilar in premise to Michel Faber's Under The Skin; an alien on Earth is preying on humanity, using sex to consume them. Walking Practice is a short volume, and an extremely visceral one; Min is interested in the physicality of a being from another world, which is completely alien to ours, and how it pretends to be human. Part of that is Min playing with Mumu's alien physiology - described in extremely outre terms, very much beyond human biology, and with a lot of bodily fluids. Part of it is in Mumu's difficulty with being human; while Mumu enjoys sex (in both human disguise and their natural form, the latter being masturbation of their many different genitalia), moving, walking, and especially stairs are extremely difficult. The narrative voice of the novel is fantastic; Min's book, translated by Victoria Caudle, is narrated by the alien Mumu, to an unknown human reader. Mumu jokes with the reader, needles us, questions our assumptions, challenges our sympathies. At times, the book revels in taboo; sex, defecation, cannibalism, the minutiae of life, all are rendered in exquisite detail by Min's pen. It is never without purpose though, and the challenging nature of the text is belayed by a simplicity of prose that is sharp, clean, and brilliant. Walking Practice is obviously playing in both a queer space and a disability space; Mumu highlights the ways we make moving through the world as someone with invisible physical disabilities hard, with the pain of climbing stairs or walking long distances, and of simply maintaining human form. Mumu is also fundamentally alien - it preys on both men and women, heterosexual and otherwise, and given that the preying involves sex before feeding, that means taking on different genders. Indeed, Mumu explicitly calls out the ridiculousness of human attitudes to gender early on in the novel. Walking Practice may be short, especially with pages given over to Min's monochrome illustrations - presumably renderings of Mumu, and all very organic-looking and strange - but it packs a huge amount into that space, and all of it brilliant.