I added The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo to my Libby queue after reading narfna’s Cannonball Read review, because their description of a slow (but not in a boring way), slightly melancholic but heartfelt historical fiction/fantasy novel sounded like catnip (foxnip??) to me. I’ve been in a review rut since…last September…(despite having read quite a few excellent books in the meantime!), and this short, engaging, lovely little story seemed like the absolutely perfect book to get back on the ol’ wagon with.
The Fox Wife follows two main characters in 1908 Manchuria: White the fox (a fantastical creature that can appear as a human “just like you, only usually better looking”) and Bao the investigator (who has a mysterious ability to tell whether someone is telling the truth or not). White is embarking on a journey of revenge to find the man she holds responsible for her child’s death, and Bao is investigating the identity of a young woman found dead in the doorway of a restaurant. While the two stories don’t obviously overlap at the book’s start, Yangsze Choo weaves the characters and storylines together expertly. While neither story follows a particularly predictable path, by the end of the book I couldn’t have imagined the characters of White or Bao making a single choice differently.
I particularly enjoyed how Choo incorporates foxes into the thread of everyday life, and makes their characteristics and struggles seem almost normal and mundane to White and the other fox characters – while at the same time, making all of their interactions completely mystifying to the human characters. Each of the fox characters are fully fleshed out and engaging in their own way, but Choo also makes it clear that their motivations and the ways they interact with the world around them are not entirely human. In particular, White’s character of the vengeful and heartbroken mother is deeply relatable during chapters focusing on her, and then entirely mysterious during Bao’s chapters.
I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys either historical fiction or fantasy novels – The Fox Wife is so thoroughly grounded in the reality it presents that fans of either genre will be satisfied. I will say, if you are looking for a traditional mystery story where the “bad guy” is uncovered and righteously punished, this is not the book for you. There were a few threads that I felt could have been tied up more thoroughly, and the ending of the book felt a bit abrupt to me – but as Snow says, “a beginning is where you choose to plant your foot, and the ending is only the edge of one’s own knowledge.”