Mammoths at the Gates

How could I stop myself from reading this lovely novella..?? I know there's still time for the release but I just needed a bit of familiarity and being back in the world of Singing Hills was a joy and I'm so glad I got the arc of this book.

Our favorite cleric Chih is back at Singing Hills too and it was so nice to finally see their home through their eyes, even though it's dampened by the grief of losing their mentor and the threat of mammoths at their gates. Almost Brilliant also finally makes an appearance, now already a mother and even more authoritative than I remember. But what this lovely novella is ultimately about grief and loss - how losing someone important maybe inevitable but how we grieve them can be different, each person's grief can manifest in myriad unexpected ways but nothing is wrong with that, and it's the bonds we have built and shared that help us through the tough times.

This is a short and maybe bittersweet but also hopeful tale about losing, grieving and moving on, finding our ways through change, and cherishing the friendships and relationships we have built over the years - all told through the form of stories. It's a perfect addition to this amazing series, carrying forward its theme of how stories keep memories alive, and paving the way for our main characters' future adventures. I can only hope that the author will let us be a part of these future journeys too.

What I love about the previous books is the telling of the cleric Chi who travels the world to hunt down stories and knowledge. This one instead returns Chi to the Singing Hills, to home. I was looking forward to meet Almost Brilliant again, but the story, sadly, did not catch my attention.

For me it's a 2.5* but I want to round up for 3 in an acknowledgement that I think the right reader will absolutely adore it.

I liked this book better than its predecessor in the series, Into the Riverlands, because of its emphasis on the interactions of individuals and their memories. Riverlands was an emphasis on the local stories the cleric was collecting and less time spent on the group being travelled with.

In Mammoths I did have alot of confusion keeping track of who was talking when the word 'they' was being used. I interpreted this to be a community of individuals that refer to themselves as they/them, which means 'they' could mean the individual doing the speaking or could mean another person being spoken of, in the same sentence.

This confusion didn't detract from my enjoyment of the story or the characters.

This novella is the fourth in the Singing Hills Cycle, which makes this another series I'm caught up on! (yay!) (Only temporarily, though - there is a 5th book set to release next year and apparently 2-3 more planned after that??)

These stories take place in a world that feels like it could be imperial China, but with magic. We follow the cleric Chih, whose goal is to collect stories from wherever they may find them. This book is somewhat different in that we follow Chih home and get to learn about the place they come from. It is also a story about grief and loss and the ways in which we manage those feelings.

I really enjoy these books, the author does a great job of packing an impactful story into a small package. The author says you can read these books in any order, so if you see one I'd advise giving it a try.

Though good, this was a bit of a let down and I think I can explain why. The first three novellas hit an itch for me personally around storytelling, meaning they don't feel like books and Vo isn't an author, they're a storyteller and had me entranced with each tale. You follow Cleric Chih around the landscape as they find and collect stories from the people they meet. This one broke a bit of the magic for me though, I think that is my issue. You're at their monastery and it felt like a book with plot, etc. On the positive side, I am always a sucker for a book that covers grief really well and this one had a glint of that and I've seen some reviewers I follow say it's their favorite of the series.

While these books always have another angle on storytelling, this one hit particularly hard: in grief, does a group of people remembering a person add up to the total of that person? What about the second hand, ‘best of' version?  When you've been away from a friend, living your lives, how could a return to where you were as children ever equal in knowledge the years you didn't spend together, how you changed and grew? Somehow the stories in this series are gentle, even playful, as well as solemn. They carry a weight that ensures you pay attention.
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