Hardcover, 112 pages
Published Oct. 24, 2022 by Tordotcom.
Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the riverlands to record tales of the notorious near-immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the road to Betony Docks, they fall in with a pair of young women far from home, and an older couple who are more than they seem. As Chih runs headlong into an ancient feud, they find themselves far more entangled in the history of the riverlands than they ever expected to be.
Accompanied by Almost Brilliant, a talking bird with an indelible memory, Chih confronts old legends and new dangers alike as they learn that every story—beautiful, ugly, kind, or cruel—bears more than one face.
Always enchanting, the Singing Hills novellas are little gems of storytelling, you want to read them all quickly and make them last as long as possible at the same time.
This is the second book I've read from the series and it's amazingly different from the first, rather quiet one. There's a lot of martial arts action! I liked how Chih (and by extension we) first heard the stories of various martial arts legends and then found themself in one. It was also interesting to see how those stories change during their retelling although that was only a small aspect of the book. Recommended. #2024reads
The third book (out of four?) continues on the same storytelling vein as the first two, in that it's a standalone tale that thematically is about the nature of stories. All three of these first books could be read in any order, as the only continuity is the archivist monk Chih and their bird[*] friend Almost Brilliant.
What I most enjoyed about this novella was the strongly intertwined past and present stories (even more than the first book), and also the themes of how stories are distorted based on both what people want to hear and how people want their own stories to be told.
All three of these books have been enjoyable in their own different ways, but I feel like the story arc of this book had the most satisfying closure to it, such that I would probably recommend this one as the strongest one to start with …
The third book (out of four?) continues on the same storytelling vein as the first two, in that it's a standalone tale that thematically is about the nature of stories. All three of these first books could be read in any order, as the only continuity is the archivist monk Chih and their bird[*] friend Almost Brilliant.
What I most enjoyed about this novella was the strongly intertwined past and present stories (even more than the first book), and also the themes of how stories are distorted based on both what people want to hear and how people want their own stories to be told.
All three of these books have been enjoyable in their own different ways, but I feel like the story arc of this book had the most satisfying closure to it, such that I would probably recommend this one as the strongest one to start with if somebody was interested.
[*] disputed
