Our beloved cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills monastery, only to find (spoiler alert) mammoths at the gates, an imperial delegation come to collect one of their own. A lovely mediation on grief, change, and love, through a plot revealed as always in the layers and sediment of myth. Almost Brilliant gets a daughter, and an uncle, and a vast network of kin, and at long last we see more of the inner workings of the neixin (talking hoopoes who serve as the generational memory of the monastery). Nghi Vo continues to crush every single novella in this series, creating an ongoing rich tapestry. I’m so glad there’s going to be at least eight in total. (I’d try to bargain for twenty.)
“Ru took a sip of their rice wine, smiled, and looked up. In that moment, they were and weren’t the cleric Chih had grown up with. This was someone new, and something in Chih ached, because growing up, growing older, was always a kind of loss, even if what was gained repaid it all and then some.”