Reading Diary: The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

Here is a synopsis from the publisher's website:

Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking . . .

Manchuria, 1908.
In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change—or does it?

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.

I liked this book a lot. I even stayed up til 1:30 AM to finish it, which surprised me a bit. I'd read Choo's first novel, The Ghose Bride, a couple of years ago and had a hard time getting into it due to Choo's writing style. There wasn't anything wrong with it, just elements that bugged me a bit. However, I stuck with it because the premise was interesting. I'm glad I decided to give this book a try because not only was the story very compelling but the stylistic elements that bugged me with the first novel have largely cleared up as Choo writes more fiction.

The brisk pacing also helped. The chapters alternate between Bao and Snow's POV, and they're very short, so you move along quickly. Each night I told myself that I'd just read one more chapter, and then an hour later, I'd have read ten.

The connections between the two narratives become clear very early in the book, and at first, I thought I'd be bored, but actually, it helped me to become more invested in the characters as I knew what was at stake. However, despite being a story ostensibly about murders, it's a relatively light novel. Partially this is another result of the brief chapter lengths -- you don't have enough time to linger with the mystery and the primary antagonist. If this story were in the hands of another novelist, such as Shelley Parker-Chan, it would have been much more devastating. Chan's knack for ramping up the gut punches in a tragedy while still being somewhat spare with the details would have made this book a heavy thing. Given what happens in the plot, I'm not sure if Choo's light touch is wholly appropriate, but reading it during this time in my life, I appreciate the lightness. If this book were turned into a drama series, it would be a very pretty drama. I'd cast someone like Meng Ziyi, who played Wen Qing in The Untamed, to play Snow.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book and will probably give Choo's other novel The Night Tiger a go at some point.