Vividly imagined and viscerally told, Aina Hunter’s CHARLOTTE AND THE CHICKENMAN goes straight for the reader’s jugular and never lets up. Queerness, blackness, and privilege do not intersect so much as collide, in sharp-toothed moments of both wry humor and bitter verisimilitude. This vision, and this voice – peppered with both Haitian Creole and French – cannot be ignored.

– IndieReader

When a new novel appears that Alfred Jarry would be at home in, with its juicy, well-seasoned "citrus-marinated, pepper roasted steak du thigh" -- white meat, human, if you please -- take a breath.

If you smile and lick your lips or not, we'll meet for a drink at the Lounge in Breaux Bridge where tall cacati blossom at 2 a.m. and egg creams burn noire fedoras on hot house transistors.

Last night I dreamed I didn't know how to solve a personal problem. Today I read the last twenty pages of Hunter's novel, which doesn't solve my problem but flips it up to the wind. I didn't care if I didn't know where I was or when. "Post Black" anyone? How about "flesh tributes" with "House of Mandala" wine from South Africa's "Western Cape"? Not too shabby, if you ask me.

In this warm, dystopian realm where laughter sifts in, quick and fresh, an elevator rises above the small fry and family farming returns for a while at the tail end of the 21st century. Who could have guessed? "Post Black" sexy, "cellular technology" our saving food grace and evolving into the jump cut narrative ... Compelling? You bet ... Aina Hunter ...

– Allan Grabaud's recent books include Into the Mylar Chamber: Ira Cohen (Fulgur, UK, 2019), Western Terrace (Exstasis Editions, Canada, 2019), and Language of Birds (Anon Editions, US, 2020). His book reviews have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, American Book Review, Leonardo, Hyperion, Pacific Rim Review of Books, and elsewhere.

The book is brilliant, and its reception will only grow as people learn how to read and then learn to demand novels that are so rich and challenging.

– Clark Blaise, This Time, That Place (2022)

Aina Hunter’s haunted novel, Charlotte and the Chickenman, is a David Lynchian grotesque that unfolds in a surreality that hovers between dream and nightmare... Hunter is masterful in capturing the nuances of identities, depicting them in across a full spectrum rather than the binary that most discourses center upon

– Jesi Bender, Exacting Clam

“This gripping novel, an Afrofuturistic coming-of-age, finds queer, idealistic and socially isolated protagonist Charlotte Noa Tibbit in high-tech, near-future Haiti, which happens to be, in the year 2059, the unofficial epicenter of a controversial (if ecologically sustainable) food justice initiative.

– A. Breeze Harper, PhD. Seeds of Sankofa (2024)