"The Singing Hills Cycle" (starting with "The Empress of Salt and Fortune") by Nghi Vo (series; 2020-)

 **Simple put, a modern masterwork that's still being written.  Some of the most wonderful 'stories about stories' you'll ever read**

This is actually the first time for this blog that I've reviewed two works by the same author (I reviewed "Siren Queen" as one of the inaugural posts!).  It's fitting that it's Nghi Vo, who is arguably my absolute favorite modern author.  And well, simply put, I've had this blog for too long without talking about The Singing Hills.  As we start off Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month, it's time to change that

The Signing Hills Cycle is a series of novellas, each one more or less standalone.  While it makes sense to jump in with the first one as it was written with the assumption that the reader would be coming in cold, you really could pick up any of them.  The only constant throughout the novel is the main character, Chih, a cleric from the Singing Hills Monastery (although they are almost always accompanied by their partner and best friend, a neixin--a "memory bird" with perfect recall--named Almost Brilliant.  A delightfully snarky juxtaposition to Cleric Chih's general calm, professional demeanor).  Chih's monastery is dedicated to a simple mission, preserving stories:

“That is your calling, isn’t it? To remember and to mark down.”

“It is. Sometimes the things we see do not make sense until many years have gone by. Sometimes it takes generations. We are taught to be content with that.”

And so each novella in this series is a different story, as Chih travels around collecting tales.  Some books are stories they sought out specifically, others are ones they stumbled into.  But the theme is a simple one, everyone has a story, and even the stories that "everyone knows" have a deeper truth to them

The first novella, "The Empress of Salt and Fortune", starts with Chih going through the storerooms of an old palace, listening to a story being told by its elderly caretaker.  While the characters in the novel know the story of the exiled Empress who once lived here, and what she did for revenge, we the reader learn the story bit by bit as the caretaker helps Chih sort through objects and tells what memories each item jogs.  Of course, the caretaker's firsthand accounts don't always line up with the official version.  The publishers' blurb calls it, "a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women." . . . Vo herself calls it, "a story about memory and love. There's a lot of fear and fury in it, a lot of terrible things that happen to the people who least deserve them, and there is a victory at the end, but yeah, mostly it's about the people we remember, how we love them while they're here, and how we love them after they're gone."

The third novella, "Into the Riverlands", is quite obviously a massive love letter to the wuxia genre, from the classic novels to oldschool Kung Fu movies (you can practically hear the sound effects, while reading).  Chih travels into the Riverlands looking for stories:  "The whole world talks about the martial legends that come out of the riverlands, and I would like to see what the riverlands might want to say if they were asked."  This one is very Scheherazade, stories nested upon stories, as each character Chih meets has a different tale to tell of the fantastic martial feats they have observed.  Throughout, Chih muses on the nature of stories and of legends, about how the tale can grow larger than the actual events and take on a life of its own.  Although Chih is charged by her order in collecting stories, she understands that the purpose of this is beyond merely recording history--that the legends have importance and meaning in and of themselves

The fifth novella, "The Brides of High Hill", is Vo's fun little detour into supernatural horror.  Chih is attending a wedding party, a beautiful young woman who has been sent to marry a rich and powerful older man.  It's obvious pretty early on that this is Vo's take on the Bluebeard story, and yet . . . something, however, is not right here.  Vo does creeping dread as well as she does everything else:  "In the final years of the Ku Dynasty, the empire was eaten from within by rich bureaucrats and from without by strange beasts."  Throughout, though, is a deeply feminist theme, as the story investigates the subtle power women are often forced to yield in the face of the world's prejudices.  A little bit of a mystery, a little bit of a horror story, and a whole lot of fun getting to the ending

Honestly, I can keep going.  Each of the entries in this series is unique, but the thread tying them together (other than Chih themself, whose perspective is a welcome constancy) is the joy with which Vo jumps from genre to genre.  You get the sense that she's telling the stories simply because these were the stories she grew up reading, and now Chih has given her an excuse to try her hand at them herself

I love this series for so many reasons, in so many ways.  I'll try to rein myself in from going too over the top with my praise, but for real.  Every page is full of Vo's joy at the stories we tell, and the way these stories change us and change the whole world (this is me reining myself in)

There's so much to talk about here.  I love the format, reminiscent of my favorite episodic tv shows like "Midnight Diner" or "Columbo" in which the "main" character happily takes a backseat and lets this week's main character tell his or her story.  While we do learn bits and pieces about Chih ("They weren’t brave, and despite the shaved head and the indigo robes, they weren’t particularly virtuous, but more than anything else, they were curious, and sometimes that could stand in for the rest."), Chih is rarely the center of events.  In the space of 100-150 pages, we get to meet an incredible cast of characters in each book.  We come to know and understand them, we hear their stories, and then we say goodbye and move to the next

Oh, and like all of Vo's work, these books are inclusive as hell, in the best possible way.  Chih is gender nonbinary, and there are diverse characters across the spectrum.  There are happy heterosexual relationships, happy homosexual relationships, polyamorous relationships, unhappy heterosexual relationships, unhappy homosexual relationships . . . honestly, one of the joys of reading Vo's work is the willingness to show humanity in all its different versions

I suppose that's where I'll end this review.  These novels are love letters to the idea of story itself, and this is a love I certainly share.  I adore Nghi Vo, will read anything she chooses to write.  And certainly will read each new addition to this series

I loved these books

“The world starts with a story. So do dynasties and eras and wars. So does love, and so does revenge. Everything starts with a story.”