Book Review: The Singing Hills cycle (5 novellas)
A friend put me on to Nghi Vo's Singing Hills novellas at the very beginning of March, and I have been picking my way through them ever since. Having just finished book 5 last night, I thought they were definitely worth a review, although the cycle is not finished yet (book 6 is expected out later this year). I have only added the first cover image, but the cover art style is the same for all of the books.
1. The Empress of Salt and Fortune: 9/10
This one has been described as a feminist LGBTQIA high fantasy, which I think is accurate, but also incomplete. It is also a story of the games of thrones and how they are played to the suffering of the everyday people who get caught up in them. And it is also a story about loyalty and what it costs as well as what it brings.
The central device - Chih, a travelling cleric, and Almost Brilliant, their neixin (sentient recorder hoopoe bird), meet up by chance with an old woman at the previously-embargoed Scarlet Lake, and she unfolds her story to them - is an oldie but a goodie, and it works extremely well. Rabbit (the old woman) and In-yo, the titular Empress that she served, emerge as vivid, complex and compelling characters. In-yo in particular is far from a perfect person, or indeed a perfect Empress, but her humanity is there alongside her nobility and the frequent implacability that goes along with it. And Rabbit - oh, Rabbit. It would be very hard to end this little jewel of a story with anything but love for her. She is loyal and strong and immensely kind, curious and brave and committed to justice. Both as a young woman and an old one, she has a dignity and force that cannot be denied, no matter how lowly her ostensible status.
The story of In-yo's mistreatment, exile, peril, and eventual danger-filled rise to power was wonderfully told and almost lyrical in its presentation. Vo's prose has a singsong quality that elevates it well away from what the great Ursula LeGuin once described as "Poughkeepsie" - prose that is so ordinary and flat that it destroys any sense of wonder or transportment in the reader. The mythical empire, closely based on Imperial China but with the usual amount of fantasy-licensed tweaks, is beautifully rendered, as is In-yo's northern home, sketched in just a few short sentences.
All in all, a lovely fantasy novella. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it whetted my appetite for the next.
2. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain: 7/10
The second book in the cycle, this one was good, but less outstanding to me than the first. The tiger love story read more as folklore rather than recounting of a secret history, which is what I enjoyed the most about the first one. That said, the world-building is on point, the character work is good (although not as compelling as in the first), and it's an entertaining quick read.
I think it lacked two things for me in comparison with the first book - the lack of Almost Brilliant, whose presence spiced up the first story, and the almost complete lack of any further growth or discovery for Chih. I started to feel somewhat baffled by them as a character, or rather, their lack of discernible character. Little did I know that this was about to change!
3. Into the Riverlands: 8/10
The third novella was, for me, mostly a return to the form displayed in the first book, after a slump in book 2. Picking up the story of Chih's travels as they venture into the riverlands, the book both has more present-day movement and action, and more varied and interesting stories for Chih to gather, than the fairly monotonal affect of book 2.
I was also delighted that Almost Brilliant returned to the fray, and once again, as in book 1, the surrounding characters were vivid and compelling in this one. I felt the riverlands milieu was densely and convincingly drawn (another example of Vo's wonderful world-building skill) and the story raced along engrossingly from start to finish.
A highly enjoyable novella, calibrated perfectly to the length - the story felt neither stretched nor truncated.
4. Mammoths at the Gates: 9.5/10
This is my favourite book in the cycle so far. In it, we follow Chih back to their home, the abbey of Singing Hills, where they find things very different from when they left, and a crisis in the midst of unfolding.
Unlike the earlier novellas, this book does not focus on the stories that Chih is collecting from the people they meet. I had been feeling that Chih's own character development was desultory in this series, with them mostly acting as a blank foil for the rich folklore and tales of adventure that other, more vivid, characters share. In this book, Chih really emerges as a person in their own right, as they struggle with their grief for their dead mentor, Cleric Thien, and their difficulty and sense of loss with the changes in their childhood best friend and in their lifelong beloved home.
The plot is gentle and reflective, despite the ostensible menace of the mammoths (literally) at the gates of the abbey (brought there by the deceased Thien's granddaughters, who are trying to claim Thien's body for burial in the family grave, despite the fact that Thien renounced their wordly life when they joined the abbey and is now destined to be interred with other clerics of the order). It is always obvious that no harm is going to come to anyone, but the mammoths serve a purpose, creating an impetus for Chih and the abbey to open a hard but necessary conversation with Thien's granddaughters.
To me, this is a book about grieving, about the loss and gain that change implies, about the beauty and ache of life, and about memory - how the best and truest thing we can do for the ones we love when they are gone is to never stop remembering them and never stop speaking their names and telling their stories. The neixin Myriad Virtues is the Final Boss embodiment of all of these truths, but it is Chih's human journey, making their personality so much more real, that moved me the most. An absolute gem of a novella.
5. The Brides of High Hill: 7.5/10
This one starts off as a pretty straightforward Bluebeard pastiche (told well, because Vo tells everything well), but quite quickly, there is a creeping sense of strangeness and disjunction that itches at the back of the brain, signalling a folkoric complexity to the story. I can't say much more about the plot without inserting spoilers that would decrease the impact, but I will say that the story uncovers another side of Chih (who is finally on a substantial growth arc as a character) and takes a different approach to novellas 1-3 in that the focus is not on people telling Chih their stories, but rather, Chih living inside the stories as they unfold. It is more horror-adjacent than any of the previous books, which is not generally my bag (one of the reasons I rate it lower than most of the earlier ones), but it is beautifully written, and I think very enjoyable for those already into the canon.
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