Rating: 5🌈

Through four incredible books, we’ve been with Cleric Chih as they have journeyed through the country, on their mission of collecting stories and memories of those they encounter. Enduring much, Chih has ventured through vast stretches of plains, traveling through haunted woods and eerie misty swamps to meet, or listen of mythical beings, whether it’s a  Pig Man, ancient royal ghostly servants, or deadly Tiger sisters. They’ve been the temporary companion of a group of scouts and their young northern mammoths as they navigated the harsh weather and bandits through the high winter mountain passes.  Each and every trail and story full of cultural references, ghosts, mythical creatures, and historical legends.  Scary, emotional, thought provoking, and moving tales that left Chih moving onto the next road and new destination. 

Chih, along with the hoopoe Almost Brilliant, a neixin, a companion sentient species that remembers everything. A race of beings that author Nghi Vo has done an incredible job in creating and now expands on here with Cleverness Himself, Almost Brilliant, and the unforgettable Myriad Virtues.

Now they’re finally returning home.  After four years journey, Chih has returned home to the Singing Hills Abbey, a place that the reader has only heard about from Chih’s memories, references, and conversations with others. Including those with Almost Brilliant. 

And we are there in what turns from a incredibly joyous anticipatory moment into one of surprise, then unsettled 

Once inside the ancient Abbey, Chih faces momentous challenges and change.  Outside the gates, the secular world is demanding that the clerics submit to immediate demands. Inside those walls, they face the recent death of their Divine(Abbot)Thien, who since their arrival had been everything to Chih, father, teacher, mentor, and leader.

Mammoths at the Gates becomes a beautiful, quietly powerful story about grief, death, and what loss does to one. About mourning, processing grief, and how that very experience can be transformative. 

Its a profoundly poetic story.  In encapsulates within a dramatic narrative, many fundamental truths, that the person one has known can often be someone completely different in another part of their life, that everyone holds within them a variation of truths that effect how others perceive them. 

For each one ,memory layered within their personal beliefs, lives, as well as what they think they knew about that individual. Memories with the ability to wound, to salve, to create a new perspective and a new beginning. 

It’s the deceased Thien, who divides and powers the story. Remnants of his former life are fiercely making demands outside the ancient Abbey gates. Inside the gates and beloved stone walls,are those who were deeply involved in his later clerical years , the clerics and neixin, all who are mourning him and divided over how to handle their grief, loss.  Along with all the warriors at the gates. 

Chih’s emotions, their friend and acting Divine, Ru, the neixins whose deep connections to their clerics is revealed and fully explored here, as well as those fierce women from the deceased Thien’s former secular life. 

Cleric Chih, that gentle nonbinary cleric, is seen in their full present own world for once. In vividly descriptive scenes, the author introduces us to the almost mythical world of the Singing Hills Abbey,from its still war stained stone walls to the old cook handing out the food Chih hopes for and gets to eat upon their return. It’s incredibly believable and richly detailed, from the rooms, kitchen and meals, to the highly imaginative aeries of the neixin. 

The ending was so entirely unexpected and yet so memorable. It’s in keeping with the series, and the spirit of this story and unique universe. 

There’s another tale coming. So like cleric Chih I’ll be enthusiastically venturing forward into the next journey with them and whatever hoopoe they travel with. 

The Singing Hills Cycle and author Nghi Vo have won many awards.  They are richly deserved.  Memorable characters, remarkably emotional and thoughtful storytelling combined with a multitude of mythological and historical elements.

It’s all a must read.

And those covers are incredible.

The Singing Hills Cycle:

• The Empress of Salt and Fortune #1
• When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain #2
• Into the Riverlands #3
• Mammoths At The Gates #4
• The Brides of High Hill #5

Buy Link

        Mammoths at the Gates (The Singing Hills Cycle Book 4)

Blurb:

The Crawford and Hugo Award-Winning Series 

Finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novella; shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award, the Ignyte Award, the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction; One of Book Riot’s Best Fantasy Debuts of All Time; A Milwaukee Journal Best of 2023 Pick; A Recommended Reading List Pick for Locus; A Powell’s Best of 2023 Pick

“Both tear-jerking and gut-punching. . . . Entirely accessible on its own, it is an excellent place to start if you haven’t read any of Vo’s novellas yet.”—The Washington Post

The wandering Cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey for the first time in almost three years, to be met with both joy and sorrow. Their mentor, Cleric Thien, has died, and rests among the archivists and storytellers of the storied abbey. But not everyone is prepared to leave them to their rest.

Because Cleric Thien was once the patriarch of Coh clan of Northern Bell Pass–and now their granddaughters have arrived on the backs of royal mammoths, demanding their grandfather’s body for burial. Chih must somehow balance honoring their mentor’s chosen life while keeping the sisters from the north from storming the gates and destroying the history the clerics have worked so hard to preserve.

But as Chih and their neixin Almost Brilliant navigate the looming crisis, Myriad Virtues, Cleric Thien’s own beloved hoopoe companion, grieves her loss as only a being with perfect memory can, and her sorrow may be more powerful than anyone could anticipate. . .

“A remarkable accomplishment of storytelling.”—NPR on The Empress of Salt and Fortune

“Nghi Vo is one of the most original writers we have today.”—Taylor Jenkins Reid on Siren Queen

The Hugo Award-winning Singing Hills Cycle

The Empress of Salt and Fortune

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain

Into the Riverlands

Mammoths at the Gates

The Brides of High Hill

• Publisher: Tordotcom (September 12, 2023)
• Publication date: September 12, 2023
• Language: English
• Print length: 123 pages