Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on September 12, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
Mammoths at the Gates is the fourth novella in Nghi Vo's "Singing Hills" cycle of Novellas. The Singing Hills novellas all follow Cleric Chih and their neixin (a talking intelligent hoopoe bird who never forgets) named Almost Brilliant as they go around this fantasy world and collect and tell stories, whether they be tales or histories. So the first novella (The Empress of Salt and Fortune) dealt with the story of the rise of an outsider Empress through the telling of her companion; the second novella (When the Tiger Came down the Mountain) tells a romance between a tiger woman and a human...but has the story told from both the perspective of humans and from the perspective of tigers; the third novella (Into the Riverlands) was a wuxia tale of martial artists and kung fu tales seeming in the past...but maybe in the present as well? Each tale was really well done, often very fun, and award worthy, as Cleric Chih's encounters with stories allowed Vo to touch serious and fun themes in different genres.
Mammoths at the Gates flips things a little - where Cleric Chih is usually a passive observer, here the novella focuses on events and people Chih actually has experienced: mainly the life of one of their mentors at the Singing Hills Monastery, who has now passed away, and whose body is now wanted by the mentor's blood relatives, who are threatening to storm the monastery with the titular mammoths. But the focus flip doesn't prevent this novella from being a tale about stories, and about a number of fascinating things - grief, how we see people from different (good and bad) lights, and how people change over time in ways others never could have anticipated. It isn't my favorite novella in the series, but it's another very effective one.
Quick Plot Summary:
For the first time in a long time Cleric Chih has come home - to the monastery at Singing Hills. After years of traveling, Chih has returned to record the tales they have gathered...and to reunite with their Neixin, Almost Brilliant, who had returned to the monastery to have a child.
But to Chih's surprise, they find the monastery besieged by a pair of women soldiers armed with a squad of combat Mammoths. The monastery's neutrality and Imperial charter should prevent it from being the subject of such an attack, but the women are here for a personal reason: their grandfather was Chih's mentor and has now passed away, and they demand to take his body back for burial, rather than to leave it in the custody of the monastery. And to make matters stranger, the Monastery is mostly deserted due to the scholars all being away to investigate a once in a lifetime find and Chih's childhood friend Ru is the only one left to be in charge.
To prevent rash actions from leading to disaster, Chih will have to find a middle road between a stubborn young cleric who isn't who Chih remembers, a greiving older Neixin, and a pair of young women with their own memories of a person Chih once considered their cherished mentor....
Thoughts: Usually, Singing Hills novellas deal with the stories people tell in places Chih visits, and the way stories conflict and interact with each other is a center of the novella. Here, in this novella, we see not only stories interacting with each other - as Chih, Ru, the two young women Vi In Yee and Tui In Hao, and the Neixin Myriad Virtues all have their own stories (good and bad) about the late Cleric Thien - but also how the images people have themselves and others interact with those stories.
So for Ru, Chih finds that the cleric who wanted to adventure with them has become a person who wants to be a leader of the monastery in the vein of Thien while in the two young women, one of them wants to honor the grandfather she only knew through a glorious story of triumphant justice, while the other has heard negative things about that grandfather and mostly wants to prevent her sister from doing rash things. In Myriad Virtues, we see how grief has made a neixin wish to stop being who she is, and how to stop remembering...requiring a transformation of her own. And then in Almost Brilliant and her baby daughter, the incredibly cute and excitable Chiep, we see how Chih's own story has impacted others in ways Chih couldn't have expected.
All of this combines to a fascinating story I don't want to spoil or go too deep into about how life events shape people, how grief affects us all in different ways, and how people grow and change in ways both good and bad. This is a story about life and growing up to impact others, and it's very good. Recommended, as usual for this series.
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