This is such a comforting series and this fourth installment is no different. Rather than following cleric Chih as they travel the land in search of stories, we instead see them in their home environment at the monastery of Singing Hills. It was fascinating to see the abbey and its workings, to experience more Neixin with different personalities than the inimitable Almost Brilliant and to see how Chih interacts with their long time friends. Focusing heavily on the power of memory and stories to help the grieving process, I had a wonderful time with this one and will continue to read every book in the series as they come out.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

The stories Nghi Vo has told in the Singing Hills novellas have all had a conceit, a neat little framing device that shapes the story into something a little more than just a story. It's one of the best things about the series, and means I go into each new one excited not just to know what happens, but how it's told. In the first, it was framed around found objects, the second a story told by different tellers, the third had unconnected tales that turned out to be connected by the people in them. In Mammoths at the Gates, the fourth in the series, it's stories of a person told by the different people who knew them at their funeral, stories from those who loved them, who think of them fondly, their fellow clerics, their companion and their granddaughters, who knew them only as the best they were... and one that isn't quite so flattering, but no less true.

I read this book one week after my grandmother died.

Normally, I'm not so keen to put quite so much of myself into my reviews as this, but the resonance between the story and what has happened so recently in my own life was impossible to ignore.

My grandmother was... a complicated woman. Rarely a nice one, though more often to people who didn't know her well. The legacy she left us, when she passed, was no less complex. Her will makes plain that she cared very much about lifting some of those who survived her above others, showing her favour and her disdain in equal parts. No matter how much one knows about this when the person is alive, it becomes harder to bear when you realise it's the last thing they leave in the world, the message they want to be seen after they've gone, their last word. As I say, complicated. But part of dealing with that complexity is the family that gathers at the passing, who tell their own stories about her. I haven't seen my aunt - who lives abroad - in years, but we sat in the emptiness of my grandmother's house, her and my mother and me, and naturally, what grew out of that emptiness was stories. Stories the others may not have known, or that saw a complex woman from another side than the one the listener had in their mind, or that revealed hurts she caused that the rest of us simply never knew about.

My mother asked me yesterday, did I want to speak at her funeral? I declined. I don't know how I'd even begin to frame that complexity into something appropriate for speaking publically.

Nghi Vo did.

She begins the funeral with the expected stories, the ones that praised the deceased for the things most prized by the speaker. Patience, compassion, cunning, by turns. They reveal the different sides of the person, as person in the world and later as a cleric, to the surprise of those who only knew one part of them. But the greater surprise comes in the story that is not the best but the worst of their life. The listeners all had to then reframe their knowledge of the deceased, around the discovery that they weren't, as everyone had thought, always quite so wonderful.

That sort of story is so rare, in life and in books. We do not speak ill of the dead. We certainly do not speak ill of the fondly-remembered dead, or those who were good and bad in parts*. But as Vo shows, there is incredible power in remembering the truth of a person, the good and the bad together, an emotional impact that cannot be achieved by simply speaking the kind words, the ones that everyone expects to hear. It was an impact I did not realise I would appreciate quite so much, but I felt it all the way down to my bones as I read it. It hurt, and it helped, to have a story reminding me that we can have complex feelings for our dead, in a time when I needed just that. From a personal perspective, I might even say this is the best of the stories in the series, simply because it has hit me so intimately in my own unsettled emotions.

But even if I step outside this personal impact, it's a story whose themes are bittersweet and beautifully crafted. As well as those of death and mourning and the memories of a person left behind - themes made all the more poignant in a setting full of characters whose entire purpose is their perfect recall - it is also a story of how people change, how parting and returning may bring you back to a different person than the one you left behind. And that in discovering that, you realise you too are different from the person who left. All the Singing Hills books are deeply, inexorably rooted in people and their relationships, but Mammoths at the Gates doubly so. We follow Chih, our cleric protagonist, as they return to the Singing Hills Abbey after their travels, hoping to see again their neixin companion who returned before them, as well as their familiar fellow clerics and old tutors. But they find their best friend suddenly serious and grown up, their neixin now a mother of a fledgling, and much of the abbey gone to a nearby situation that requires their attention. Their home is almost empty, and they have to reckon with the changes against the backdrop of a very present threat - the eponymous mammoths at the gate - whose title drop within a few pages of the opening of the story I particularly appreciated.

But like all the other stories, it isn't really a story about Chih, no matter that we continue to learn about (and love) them through how they approach the stories of other people. And it is no different here - we learn about Chih through how they cope with the changes they bear witness to in their erstwhile best friend, and the stories they hear and react to during the funeral. They are the conduit through which we receive the stories, and like any good medium, they bring with them their own personality to the message. For only novellas, for stories that always spotlight other people, Nghi Vo has done an amazing job of giving us such an insight to the person on the fringes of all those stories, a wry, cheerful, thoughtful, ever so slightly rebellious but ultimately dedicated cleric, one who truly yearns to hear what people tell them, and believes in their duty to keep those stories safe, because the things that happen to the people in their world, even the little things, ultimately matter.

We likewise get those tantalising little glimpses into the world, and as in all the books, we continue to dwell particularly on food. In a book about homecoming and comfort, it feels all the more important to have that there, all the more true to life. Cleric Chih has always been quick to describe what they eat - or want to eat - in all the novellas, and so getting back to the green onion buns, the rice and mustard greens, the salted plums of their home, the things that comfort them against the world, makes you yearn for those foods too, even if you've never tried them yourself. Because they're not described in the way food sometimes is, as vivid sensory experiences, full of taste and smell and almost sensual aesthetics. Instead, food reverts to its emotional self - rice as a balm for the soul, a green onion bun or milk candies as nostalgia, a salted plum as a rare treat. We understand food, as we understand much of the story, through the lens of Chih's experience. Whether or not I would like salted plums, here, they are likeable, and that positioning in the story is, for the moment, more important than my own imaginings of what a salted plum might taste like.

If I were to be fanciful, I might say that all the Singing Hills books are a thesis on the importance of bias for the narrator in a story. Because they would not be what they are - which is wonderful - if they weren't constantly coloured by the perspective from which we see them. Whether it is Chih and their experiences, or the framing devices that shift from book to book, each of these stories is as much the medium as the message, the two woven so thoroughly together that extraction would make each meaningless except as part of the whole. And Mammoths at the Gates is no different in that.

But likewise, for me, it is also now inextricable from my own experiences, and my own bias. I cannot but view it through the lens of my own mourning, I cannot but find myself in the story, and be comforted. I declined to speak at my grandmother's funeral, and ultimately, so does Chih decline to speak at their mentor's. I find a form of fellowship in that; I feel seen. And it is a testament to how well the story is told that such resonance is so easy to grasp, and so poignant.

*On twitter, we quite frequently speak ill of the terrible dead, but twitter is its own little microcosm, and I don't want to use it as a pattern for society at large. God no.

3.5 stars

This one felt, to me, lacking in the lyricism that makes this series so special. However, it makes up for that lack mostly by letting Chih finally be a character rather than an avenue for stories. We see Chih confront their own memories and the ways their mind has locked down on past moments, resisting change (even as they themself have changed and grown through their travels). The story is full of themes of never knowing a person truly and also of memories and moments only being a fraction of a whole being- how a person can be many things to many people (or even the same single person).

I liked that the central conflict in the story was messy, and I wish we got to spend more time with the mammoth rider and the advocate, because I think they were very interesting and we saw only a tiny sliver of their characters.

The Singing Hills Cycle Novella series already has its fourth installment. And I think this might be my favorite.

This time Chih returns back to the Singing Hills Abbey. Happy to return to the people that she knows and to Almost Brilliant, she instead runs into mammoths at the gates. A dispute about a death and a body disguising a whole lot of grief.

Because that is what this story is about. Grief. About all the different ways someone meant something to someone else. The good and the bad. Accepting the choices someone has made, even after death. And Nghi Vo manages to pack a lot of feelings into just 128 pages.

But I also loved seeing the abbey, the memories and relationships that Chih has with everyone. Like her childhood friendship. A friendship that was always solid but that has been changed because of their time apart and their change in status. It is something that Chih has to come to grips with.

We also see and learn more about the Nexus. Before we only saw Almost Brilliant. In this installment Chih returns alone from her trip to the abbey. Almost Brilliant was pregnant and gave birth to a new Nexus. We get to see the aviary and their nesting. But most of all the dynamic between the different Nexus' and how they also how their own morals and unwritten rules about how their society should be. What happens when someone responds different?

Like I said, Nghi Vo manages to pack so much in so few pages. These novella's are real gems to read.

4.75 STARS

CW: death (of a loved one), grief, violence, mention of domestic abuse

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I completely and utterly loved this story. It's the fourth installment in a series of novellas in the Singing Hills Cycle about Cleric Chih who returns home to Singing Hills in this volume. It says the novellas can be read in any order but in my opinion it is only profitable to one's reading experience to stick to the publication order.

I can honestly say that while all novellas in this series are amazing, this one is definitely my favorite. It talks about so many things that hit close to home for me and does so in a lyrical, serene but nevertheless interesting and exciting way. It's a perfect mix of philosophical and action-packed. Cleric Chih returns home to Singing Hills for the first time in four years and with this return come a mixture of emotions: grief because their mentor Cleric Thien has passed away in the interim of their travels, grief for friends who have changed and become a different person, joy to be back home. It rang so true to my own experiences of returning home after being away for some time.

I loved the reflection on the person who has passed away, the realization that there were multitudes to the person and that one can have multiple version of themself over the years and in different contexts. That along with the importance and influence of memory on grief was expertly interwoven by the author.

Another highlight was getting to read so much about the neixin. I've loved Almost Brilliant in the other stories as well and I loved seeing the neixin's context within Singing Hills and their purpose there.

Overall, I deeply implore anyone to give this a shot. I'd recommend reading the previous three novellas first but if you don't feel like it, dive straight into this one (there might be some context missing though, so be aware of that). I hope there will be more future releases of this series because I've grown so fond of Chih over the course of these four novellas and I want to see more.

Really interesting examination of grief and how people change over time, I also really liked the commentary on memory and identity.

Not my favorite of these, but probably my second favorite after the first one.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an eARC of this novella, however, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

I have been absolutely enchanted with this series since I read the first one in quarantine. They're short, beautifully written, and with interesting themes running throughout. It gives enough time to explore the ideas encapsulated in each novella, but always manages to leave me wanting more. The world, the characters, and the stories are fascinating to me.

This is the first time we see the Singing Hills and also the first time we see Chih interact with other clerics. It's a story with exploring grief and legacy with some of our favorite characters returning and nods to previous ones for the eagle-eyed.

Overall, it is a lovely time and I can't wait for the next one. They've become the reading highlight of my year.

Thank you NetGalley and TorDotCom for an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Another great installment to the Singing Hills Cycle. This one focuses on grief, loss, and change. Varying people are grieving the death of Cleric Thieh and are finding ways to give remembrance to them. Nghi Vo has finally brought the readers to the Singing Hills Abbey (hence the name of this standalone series). As a reader who has read every installment thus far, I have been looking forward to this and didn't disappoint. We get to see Cleric Chih come back home and reunite with Almost Brilliant while navigating various losses: Cleric Thieh's death and a change in Cleric Ru, their best friend prior to leaving.

Change is a major theme in this installment. While you can read each novella separate and without any order, I think there is something special in reading these novellas in order of publication. I am already invested in how Chih feels in returning home and feeling a little lost when things are different than what they were. I got to learn more about niexins, the species that alway remembers. Myriad Virtues was the niexin who was close to Cleric Thieh and seeing her grief them was interesting to see and quite sad since most of the characters couldn't understand how she grieved.

Overall, I would always recommend this series to most fantasy readers who want to experience a unique world with carrying stories as the forefront of a standalone series.

Content Warnings: grief, death, death of parent, domestic abuse, animal death, animal cruelty, transphobia (minor), ableism (minor), bullying (minor)

If you are a fan of the Singing Hills Cycle series then you’ll be happy to know that a new book is coming out, Mammoths at the Gate. This is fantasy novella series featuring a Cleric who is just traveling the world and gathering stories and this is the newest entry. In this one, they return to a monastery just in time to witness the funeral rights of a teacher and the family who want the teachers remains returned. Moreover, there are two mammoths outside the gates of the Abbey with two riders claiming they are the teachers granddaughters. So lots of extra lore here, more bits to the story that rounded out our development of our Cleric. I’ve read the first 3 of this series and really liked this continuation.

Unfortunately I had to DNF since it's the fourth book in a series and not having red the first 3 books it wasn't making much sense for me to read this. (Didn't know when I requested, my bad).

this is a story about grief and mourning, about what purpose means and how to carry it, about the specific sadness of coming home and discovering the ways it's changed and hasn't in your absence, about carrying loved ones through your life and the hardship and beauty of changing alongside them, and also a sometimes funny sometimes action-packed narrative featuring mammoths and smoke bombs made out of horse sh*t and spicy peppers and talking birds.

also it's 100 pages long.

that all felt shallow at some points and i wish it spent more doing all of it, but it still did more than a lot of books that are twice as long!

** A copy of Mammoths at the Gates was provided by the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review **

Another welcome addition to the Singing Hills Cycle - this one filled with love, grief and memory.

Any fan of the Singing Hills Cycle has been waiting to finally see the Abbey. While this could have been a simple story of explaining the abbey, instead we get a powerful story of grief, loss, love and what it means to come home. This is a story I will be coming back to again and again.

This series has been such a joy for me. Each one stands mostly on it's own, and here Chih is back home. At it's heart, this is a story about how we all process grief and loss. And it's a beautiful version of that exploration. Maybe the loss is a person we respected, maybe the loss is a friendship that has changed over time, or maybe the loss is for the person we used to be. Vo continues to tell tales exquisitely, with that same touch that makes everything feel like a dream we collectively had and are just now remembering.

Story-gatherer Chih returns to the Singing Hills in this fourth volume in the series, Mammoths at the Gates, by Nghi Vo. We previously visited Chih and their neixin companion Almost Brilliant on their adventures around the empire. Their mission was to gather as many stories and as much information as they could to bring back to the Singing Hills, to save for posterity. But every journey has to end someday and it’s been years since Chih was home.

Chih no doubt thought that a few things would change in their time away but they never would have pictured returning home only to find a pair of mammoths and representatives of the Empire at the monastery’s gates. Once they sneak make their way through the gates, with no little trouble, they learn why the Singing Hills has been graced with a visit. The imperial officials are on a family errand: to collect the body of their grandfather before Chih’s order inters him in the monastery. Years prior, this grandfather absconded from his family and joined the Singing Hills. Everywhere this elder went, they made an impression. Unfortunately, those impressions—and the elder’s long life—mean that both parties have a good claim to be his resting place.

Chih plays peacemaker for the acting head of the monastery (the official head and most of the rest of the order have taken off on a rare archaeological opportunity) and the imperial visitors, while grieving the beloved elder and also trying to figure out what is going on with the elder’s neixin and the fractious colony of birds. It’s a lot but Chih is no stranger to either diplomacy or dealing with emotions and mysteries.

Mammoths at the Gates is brief (like all the books in this series) and (also like all the other books in this series) packs a big emotional wallop along with a rich history and culture inspired by medieval China and southeastern Asia. I’ve really enjoyed this series; my only complaint is that I want more of everything! Each book makes me wish that I could sequester myself in the Singing Hills archive and read anything I could get my hands on. I very much appreciate the order’s philosophy that all knowledge is worth having.

I don't want to say too much as this is the fourth installment and a novella- but this is probably my favorite yet! It was so beautiful I can't promise it won't have you in tears. How accurately Vo captures the feelings of grief, and change, and friendships, and the effects of time in such a short amount of pages is absolutely remarkable. Chih has literally my whole freaking heart.

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.

In Mammoths and the Gate, Nghi Vo turns the readers attention to the stories of the clerics themselves. This shift came as a surprise to me. I was prepared to be told a story alongside Chih that would later be entered into the Singing Hills archive; instead, I read a story about the archives as it happened around Chih. While unexpected, the story was incredibly compelling. Vo gave insight into where Chih has come from and why they do what they do. I especially appreciated learning more about the birds of Singing Hills. These "people but not humans" teach the clerics and Interlopers a lesson about grief that they could not have learned on their own.

While the other books in the Singing Hills Cycle spoke more to me, this fourth installment added a depth I didn't know was missing. I look forward to seeing where Chih travels next!

I was very excited to be approved for an ARC of Nghi Vo’s latest installment in The Singing Hills Cycle. This adventure sees the traveling cleric, Chih, return to Singing Hills abbey, and I was all for the change of scenery. It meant getting back to one of my favorite characters, the neixin named Almost Brilliant. And, while the world at large in this series is fascinating, I’ve always kind of wanted a story set at the abbey—since it was a pivotal part of Chih’s background.

This novella was everything I was hoping it would be. It still had the nested story format, but I liked how Chih was far closer to this conflict and some of the history—rather than only an observer—since the focus was on a fellow cleric who they were once close to (who had passed away). It was a messy and sensitive situation, especially where tempers and mammoths are involved. In spite of its short length, I appreciated the emotional depth that was present in the story. It’s one of the aspects that the series has excelled at since its beginning. Again, there weren’t the most pages here. But it wasn’t necessary, since, like the other novellas in The Singing Hills Cycle series, it was easy to care about and understand the perspective of even the new characters that were introduced.

Mammoths at the Gate, has reaffirmed my love for this series, its characters, and the stories within the story.

Disclaimer: this copy of the book was provided by the publisher (Tordotcom Publishing) via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

Thank you to NetGalley and Tordotcom for an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review!

In this fourth installment of the novella series, The Singing Hills Cycle, Cleric Chih takes a break from wandering and collecting stories to instead return home to the Singing Hills Abbey. When they arrive they learn that their mentor, Cleric Thien, has died and their granddaughters have arrived seeking to claim the body to bury themselves.

All of the entries in The Singing Hills Cycle have come with a distinct feel to them, influenced by the people Chih meets and the kinds of stories they share. While there are still stories to be shared in Mammoths at the Gates, what sets this entry apart is how much we learn about The Singing Hills Abbey, Cleric Chih’s order, and the neixin, the birds who partner and travel with clerics and have perfect memories. As a fan of the series, this made Mammoths at the Gates a particularly compelling read for me. I think it also makes this volume a particularly good starting point for the series as well, especially for readers who might be uncomfortable with how some novellas throw you into complex worlds with less explanations than they are used to.