Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.19 AVERAGE
4.19 AVERAGE
I admit I didn’t love this book quite as much as I did The Empress of Salt and Fortune, but it is still a marvelously well done story. I love the way Vo tells the same story from two perspectives, each fundamentally anchored in ostensibly the same events but interpreted in drastically different ways. This along side the heightened tension of the current danger to the cleric. All in all, I’ll be looking for more of Vo’s work and would happily listen to another book narrated by Kay.
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
Vo's first novella, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, is on my 20 Books of Summer possibles list. Her second one came to my hands first, though, when I wanted something short for a day spent traveling to and from the ExCel Centre in London's Docklands. Each book in the series is basically standalone; the premise is that Chih, a nonbinary cleric in a fantasy Asian-inflected society, travels around their world listening to the stories of people they meet and recording them for the archives of their order. In this installment, Chih and a local guide, who rides a mammoth, get trapped by three hungry tiger sisters who can take human form. To stave off being eaten, Chih tells them a story of a legendary tiger queen, Ho Thi Thao, and her wife, the human scholar Dieu. The tigers object to details of Chih's narration at various points ("no no no! It was like this..."), and the novella deals explicitly with how we construct truth in history writing and storytelling. I liked it plenty, but I suspect the Singing Hills Cycle might be more than the sum of its parts; the more of them I read, the more they'll probably build to a greater, more memorable reading experience than each individual element can provide. (I'm not going to lie, I also struggled with the violent and entitled behaviour of Ho Thi Thao. As love stories go, it's not a perfect romance by any means.) Anyway, interesting, I would certainly try at least one more by Vo. Source: local library #LoveYourLibrary
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes