CBR 17 BINGO: Review (see ElCicco’s 2024 review)
BINGO: Review, Purple, I, Red, Borrow
When I started seeing reviews for The Fox Wife last year, I was intrigued. It wasn’t until I finally picked up a copy from my library that I realized the author is the same person who wrote The Ghost Bride, which I read and enjoyed back in 2014. Now I was really excited.
The Fox Wife is a lovely and heartbreaking novel that borrows from Chinese mythology around foxes. Taking place in 1908 China (with stops in Japan), it follows Snow, a shape-shifting fox whose other form is a young woman, and her quest to find and kill the man responsible for her child’s death. At the same time, an aging detective named Bao investigates a series of suspicious deaths–deaths that keep bringing him back to foxes. The chapters alternate between Snow’s first-person point of view and a third-person narration from Bao’s perspective.
Part fantasy and part mystery, this story is mainly a tale of grief and love. The loss of Snow’s daughter is unbearable, and she channels that pain into a quest for justice/revenge: “Burying my face in the dry clods of earth, I thought I’d die of grief and fury. But unlike the dead, living creatures recover. I clung to my vengeance grimly, that thin vein of blood that pulsed and kept me alive.” For two years, she pursues a photographer named Bektu Nikan, the man who commissioned a local hunter to “find him a fox.” Her quest leads her to take on the role of servant to a family that owns a prosperous medicine shop. The family has its own challenges, including a curse that results in eldest sons dying in their twenties, as well as their own mysterious links with foxes. Along the way, Snow encounters fellow shape-shifters Shiro and Kuro, whose relationship with Snow is unclear–they are obviously familiar, but also adversarial.
Much of Snow’s pursuit is traced through flashbacks and revealed through Bao’s investigations. Bao himself is a remarkable character filled with sadness. After a devastating illness nearly killed him as a child, his miraculous recovery left him with the ability to hear when people are lying (a useful skill in his line of work). Foxes have figured prominently in his life as well–his childhood friend and first love, Tagtaa, always claimed to have been rescued by a black fox. As he investigates the mysterious deaths, shadows from his past rise up and he’s faced with his own sorrows. He’s a kind man, and though he pursues the “fox lady” whom he thinks might be involved in the deaths he’s investigating, he does so without relish. It’s obvious from the beginning that these two story lines are destined to intersect in curious ways. The reader’s hope throughout the tale is that both Snow and Bao can find peace.
This is novel is both beautiful and inventive. Author Yangtze Choo includes notes at the end of the book about fox spirits and observes that there are more stories in Chinese literature about fox women than men, “perhaps because many of the stories are told from the viewpoint of a male protagonist, usually a scholar, who is seduced by a woman who approaches him.” She wondered about this portrayal and decided to explore a female character in depth. She turns the mythology on its head by upsetting the status of foxes as “uncontrollable, lustful, and wicked,” and instead introducing one of the strongest female characters in recent memory.
No doubt many readers will find the premise of the dead fox child upsetting (rightfully so). I do hope people will be able to push past that aspect to embrace this enchanting story.