This was a delightful novella, surprisingly rich for its 100 pages!
Here’s the summary: Cleric Chih is a cleric in an order whose mission is to record history accurately. They are traveling via mammoth (!) with a guide, Si-yu, but are attacked and trapped en route by three wild – and hungry – tiger sisters who are also shape-shifters (!)
To stall their captors, they propose to tell the human version of the story about the tiger Ho Thi Tao and the human scholar Dieu. This is an old love story known to both humans and tiger. The Tigers are intrigued not because they haven’t heard this tale before, but because they haven’t heard the human version, and they are eager to hear it — and make corrections. The telling, listening, correcting, revising, and stalling takes up most of this short book. It’s very 1,001 Nights – in the frozen Chinese tundra, with shape-shifting Tiger ladies and also mammoths.
I loved that this book is unapologetically queer, from page 1, and this reads almost as a second thought – by that I mean that the queerness is so much a part of the tale that it’s almost as if it didn’t occur to the author or characters to point it out. Ho Thi Tao and Dieu are both women (well, one is, and the other is a Tiger woman, so you know) and this is just a fact of the story, there’s no hand-holding or hand-wringing. Cleric Chih’s they/them is clear from page 1, and again is just a fact of the tale, along with the mammoths that they ride, and the clothes that they wear.
I also loved the story-in-a-story frame, and how the Tiger sisters are hungry, and do want to eat these humans…but also love a good story. They agree to this whole proposition in the first place by claiming that the human version of the story is littered with inaccuracies, and the errors must be rectified. However, as the novella continues, it becomes clear that the Tiger sisters are just really enjoying story time. They just can’t help themselves! I also loved the characterization of the eldest Tiger sister, who acquiesces to the humans’ request to tell the story, but is careful to remind them throughout that she is really the one in charge here: ‘There is an addition for your books, cleric. Make note of it so that they will find it after we eat you. Please continue.’”
An immersive, unique read that does so much with so few pages. Recommend especially for people who are looking for queer fantasy novellas with shape-shifting big cats.
