A review by woolerys
The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

dark funny mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

I loved this book. First of all, the prose is lovely. It got repetitive at times but this helped create the impeccable pacing and added to the poetic quality. The plot was complex and revealed so deliciously slowly; there’s a stretch where you *are* getting answers but each answer spawns three new questions. And you just know at least one murder is going to happen… oh wait maybe more than one… The foreshadowing on one of them just about killed me. The characters were great and—mild, vague spoiler—
the fox characters, while being very human throughout the events in the present tense, did have a certain mischievousness and/or carelessness to them that made them believable as fox spirits even in their human forms.
So much chaos. 
 
The setting—1908 in Manchuria—does include a lot of misogyny, so check content warnings if certain circumstances or abuses in that category are likely to be triggering. The narrators acknowledge it, but they are more bystanders than either perpetrators or harbingers of justice.
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