When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
Ratings92
Average rating4.1
The beginning and end of this is a little bit of a jumble. It's hard to understand what exactly happened in the struggle. But the major part of this story was great. Chih telling the tigers the story of the woman who fell in love with the tiger was very entertaining as well as a great tool to teach inconsistent storytelling.
Although I choose to believe the tiger's story there is really no way to know which one really happened. And I think that is kinda the point. The interaction between Chih and the tigers was also pretty funny at times, you forget a little that they would kill them at any moment.
After loving Empress of Salt and Fortune earlier in the year and just wanting more of the story, I was very excited when I saw the announcement for this sequel and even more happy when I got the ARC. And this one turned out to be even better than I thought.
I think I did the right thing listening to the audiobook of the first book just last week, because it refreshed my memory of this world and it made me feel connected to this story immediately. As storytelling forms the main narrative of this novella, the author uses her poetic and beautiful writing style to weave a story within a story, while also keeping up the tension taut and us readers hooked to every single word. I was lost to the mesmerizing words and didn't even realize that the book was almost over. The book is quite fast paced, the story that Chih is narrating builds up slowly and I was quite excited to know what was gonna happen next, and all characters had very interesting personalities. The banter between them was also absolutely perfect and I had such a fun time reading the book even when it was intense.
I loved the themes that the author was trying to convey with this narrative. I have found many books in recent times deal with the concept of truth and fact, whose truth gets to be told as history and passed on across generations, and what other narratives are lost. In a similar vein, the author here tries to showcase how the same history of a scholar/Tiger couple can be told in different ways based on who is doing the narrating, and the version which gets archived for posterity depends on who controls the scholarly domain. I think this is very relevant to our current times as well and I enjoyed the way the author imparts us this message through the narration of a love story.
To conclude, this novella is storytelling at its finest, very captivating in tone, and beautiful in the imagery. I'm now more in love with this world and the author than I was before, and I hope we get more books in the Singing Hills series. And if you are someone who loves stories, you just can't miss this masterpiece.
It's a very delightful thing to read Nghi Vo's work. I haven't read anything like it before. The writing is delicate and remarkable and deserves to be read carefully and with attention to detail.
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r/fantasy Bingo Card 2021: Trans Or Nonbinary Character
What's with all these novellas! A 2 hour story is waste of my time! 1 star for this.
Not sure how this ties in to the first in the series, maybe the cleric in the story? Nothing else is sounding familiar.
Other than these, it seems well written so giving it an extra 2 stars.
I love the writing and the way the story is setup, just like the first book, but I didn't love the shifting perspectives on the same parts of the plot or that the focus of the story was a romance. If there are more stories in this series, I would absolutely read them and would still recommend this book to most people!
So, I have not read the previous book still, but the author made it clear this could be read independently. This was one of those ebooks Tor sends out to subscribers for free that goes on a folder somewhere and gets lost that I didn't actually lose and I'm glad I didn't.
Truthfully, I had no idea what to expect. Readers are trained to look for tropes, so everything I was reading about this hit those pretty hard, which are not really indicative of what the book was actually about. Sapphic romance? Cool. Historical fantasy? Sure! Nonbinary representation? Alright, cool.
I still had no idea what to expect.
One thing I noticed right away is that I've yet to really read a modern novel that tackled nonbinary representation well, as in using they/them pronouns. Most I've read have been SF and have defaulted to a specific gendered pronoun to deal with some sort of alien society, etc. There's a couple of things I noticed here. The first is that I sorta found myself getting lost at first, having to stop and realize the “they” wasn't being used for the group, but the individual. It's silly, I obviously know this and use it normally, but I haven't read a novel that does that well yet, so there you go. The second is holy shit, I read a broad range of books that err progressive, how haven't I read something that does this already? Publishing has a lot of issues, but representation needs to be more than just ornamental for brownie points. Do better. Like this book.
Alas.
What struck me about this book was how this worked on an allegorical level. Written by an Asian American during, well... I don't even know how to explain these last few years, right? People are awful and the treatment of nonwhite cultures in the west/global north errs on the side of awful, if not criminal.
So, this book asks a simple question: Who controls the narrative and how does it impact “othered” people?
Tigers are “othered” here. Feared for being vicious, blood-thirsty villains who attack at random without regards for life. They're shapeshifting, of course, which means they're actually tigers who can take the form of people to appear “normal” and, look... if you understand how a lot of nonwhite cultures exist within a fairly homogenous monoculture, you've heard about this and probably know people who have to do this to get by.
Think ‘Sorry to Bother You' and the “white voice” black folks would use at the call center to get a better reaction on the phone.
The central focus is a group cornered by three tiger sisters and the resident storyteller/cleric of the group finds a way to bargain for their lives by telling them a story. It's a well known folktale about a relationship between a tiger and a cleric.
The cleric tells the sanitized, “cultured” version of the tale, which paints the tiger as a dangerous beast to fear, dehumanizing the character for being different and misunderstood. It also shows the cleric, who within the framing of this sanitized version of the story, openly mistreats the tiger, as a civilized savior (a “white savior,” if you will).
Throughout the telling of the story, the tigers respond to each passage with frustration and anger, making the cleric write down the story as they remember it, which contains an almost identical plot, but with wildly different details.
You see, the tigers remember the tiger character with pride, label the treachery of the cleric for what it is, and don't celebrate the bare minimum the cleric does to make good without putting in any work. The tiger saves the cleric numerous times and yes, there are bargains that come with it, and some of what happens are due to cultural misunderstandings, but the tiger loves the cleric and is willing to look past most of this.
Ultimately, Chih remains afraid regardless of this heightened understanding and happily takes the assistance of other hunters swooping in to the rescue to scare off the tigers, although they do imply that the tigers should be left alone. There's a sense of yearning and perhaps this was a mistake to break a pact with the tigers like in the story and that they would spread the written story.
This proved to be a really well done case of showing how outside cultures are powerless in the face of their oppressors to control their own history or be seen as literal humans. Just fantastic stuff. I'll definitely read more from this author.
4.5 stars, rounded up.
Beautifully written, original, and compelling. I loved this even more than the first one.
A fun little novella about how stories and legends change over time. The Tigers constantly interrupting was fun. I might have enjoyed the first one a bit more, but they're both still easy, enjoyable reads.
7/10
“When you love a thing too much, it is a special kind of pain to show it to others and to see that it is lacking.”
“My love has gone from me and I will never laugh again. My love has gone from me and she has taken all light with her. I sit in the moon viewing pavilion the hem of my sleeves wet from tears and I cannot see for the grief has stolen my eyes and I cannot speak for the grief has stolen my tongue. I sit weeping eyeless, tongueless without laughter and absent from light. I sit and wait for the answer that only my wife can give.”
“I am yours, and so I will be your light and your laughter. I am yours, so open your eyes to look at me, and open your mouth so that I may kiss it. I am yours, I am yours, and nevermore will I leave.”
Sapphic
This was not as good as the first book.
Nghi Vo's writing is always great, but the story didn't work for me.
Firstly, the romance between Dieu and Ho Thi Thao wasn't that convincing to me.
Secondly, this book felt way too repetitive. The plot is basically Chih tells story, tiger interrupts story, tiger tells their own version of the story. Chih continues story, tiger interrupts again, tiger tells their own version, and so on and on.
This book is very short too, so that repetitiveness really stuck out to me and didn't allow me to enjoy it as much as I wanted to.
What a gripping tale with beautiful stories within the story. I'm so happy I continued on with the series. I loved the characters, the storytelling, the fantasy elements and mini-adventure. My issues with the first novella were with the plot and the cohesiveness around tone. I didn't find those issues with this one. Looking forward to any future adventures of Cleric Chih if Nghi Vo writes more.