Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
I quite enjoyed my time with this lovely little book. You might want to have the proper expectations going in, though, because the blurb is a little misleading. I had no expectations so I was fine. This is a mystery, but not, and this is a revenge story, but not. It’s melancholy and full of grief, but also cheeky and the main characters are also full of love, and the arc of the book is not violent justice, but reconciliation and healing. You should also go in expecting something slower paced and quiet.
This is a book that follows Snow the fox in 1908, Manchuria, China, who has entered the human world in order to track down a man that she holds responsible for the death of her child two years before. Foxes in this world can pass themselves off as human, but always stand out as beautiful, alluring, dangerous. The best part of the book was all of Snow’s talk about what it means to be a fox and how foxes must live in order to survive among humans. Her sections are told in first person POV. The second narrator is the private investigator Bao, but his sections are told in third person as he is hired to find the fiancé of man who disappeared into thin air, and as a result he becomes involved in the mysterious death of a woman found frozen to death outside of a restaurant, which leads him in other directions as well. The first half of this book feels a bit disjointed as a lot of disparate pieces of the story are floating around, but they all come together and make sense by the end.
I haven’t read this author’s previous two books, though The Ghost Bride has been on my TBR since it was first published, so I can’t say where this book lies in comparison to the other two. But I found this enjoyable in an understated way; just a quiet piece of historical fiction with a fantastical tilt. It also does that thing that good historical fiction does where it teaches you about a culture and a place without being didactic about it, as you go through life with the characters.
I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by the author, and she did a great job. I don’t normally think authors should narrate their own books, but this is one of those rare occasions where it really works. She has a clear, pleasant voice, and knows how to do the voices properly without being melodramatic about it. I might have to track down a physical copy of this one to keep, and I definitely recommend it.
