A review by mburnamfink
Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

5.0

Mammoth at the Gates is the best book in The Singing Hills cycle since the first one. Cleric Chih returns to the monastery to find trouble. An elderly teacher has died, which is sad but expected in some sense. What is not expected is that two of his granddaughters have arrived with war mammoths and are demanding to take the body home for burial, or else. Normally, Singing Hills would be capable of handling a pair of angry soldiers diplomatically. Unfortunately, most of the clerics are off at an archeological site temporarily revealed by a drained reservoir, and the acting head, a contemporary of Chih named Cleric Ru, doesn't have the experience or moral authority to deploy soft power effectively.

The plot centers around grief. Chih's own grief at the loss of a mentor. The extreme sorry of the man's niexin bird Myriad Virtues, and the difficulties of reconciling to a world with a man-shaped absence in it, while handling the mundane matters of all the stuff that accumulated. I found it wise and powerful and authentic, with one caveat.

Spoiler for domestic violence.

Spoiler

One of the stories revealed about the deceased Cleric Thien is that he crippled his wife. One argument ended with a shove, and she tumbled down a long flight of stairs and broke her leg, such that she was unable to walk those stairs again. Thien never did it again, and was a good mentor to Chih and Ru, but it raises awkward questions about d0mestic violence, abuse, and how much one bad moment defines a life