Reviews with content warning for Murder - The Fox Wife

I loved this book. First of all, the prose is lovely. It got repetitive at times but this helped create the impeccable pacing and added to the poetic quality. The plot was complex and revealed so deliciously slowly; there’s a stretch where you *are* getting answers but each answer spawns three new questions. And you just know at least one murder is going to happen… oh wait maybe more than one… The foreshadowing on one of them just about killed me. The characters were great and—mild, vague spoiler—

the fox characters, while being very human throughout the events in the present tense, did have a certain mischievousness and/or carelessness to them that made them believable as fox spirits even in their human forms.

So much chaos.

The setting—1908 in Manchuria—does include a lot of misogyny, so check content warnings if certain circumstances or abuses in that category are likely to be triggering. The narrators acknowledge it, but they are more bystanders than either perpetrators or harbingers of justice.

Content Warnings

naluminum's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I loved how even though the two point of views of the fox, Snow, and the detective, were unrelated for the majority of the plot, it was curious and intriguing to watch the threads connect between their narratives. I love stories about spirits and to have this story told from the point or view of one, a spirit who sees the good in people despite her experience with some of the worst of people and her grief that drives her for most of story is beautiful. I loved the way the foxes cultivated the mystery around themselves and the variety of ways that people were affected by the fox spirits. I do wish that the author had specified the magical skills that foxes can use more than that they can exert their will onto humans and turn into foxes and take away people yin and yang (but only if they study that particular skill). I found the ending of this story very fulfilling even though not every mystery was solved.

Content Warnings