Mammoths at the Gates

eBook, 128 pages

English language

Published May 9, 2023 by Tor.

ISBN:: 978-1-250-83800-1
Goodreads:: 70021725

(1 review)

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 …

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…

The novellas of The Singing Hills Cycle are linked by the cleric Chih, but may be read in any order, with each story serving as an entrypoint.

1 edition

enne📚 reviewed Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

5 stars

This is easily my favorite book in the Singing Hills cycle. Cleric Chih goes back home to Singing Hills abbey, and the reader finally gets to see it in person with all of its neixin and politics. There's something about having this book set in Singing Hills that makes it a lot more grounded than the other one-off travel pieces. I love Chih coming back to their friend Ru, now acting Divine of the abbey, and having to renegotiate what their friendship looks like after so much time and change on both of their parts.

But, it's also a book about grief and transformation and the way we know others through stories. I love how the theme of change weaves throughout--it makes an ending that could have felt too pat instead resonate in a thematically satisfying way.

(One nice thing about a series of novellas that can be read in …

This is easily my favorite book in the Singing Hills cycle. Cleric Chih goes back home to Singing Hills abbey, and the reader finally gets to see it in person with all of its neixin and politics. There's something about having this book set in Singing Hills that makes it a lot more grounded than the other one-off travel pieces. I love Chih coming back to their friend Ru, now acting Divine of the abbey, and having to renegotiate what their friendship looks like after so much time and change on both of their parts.

But, it's also a book about grief and transformation and the way we know others through stories. I love how the theme of change weaves throughout--it makes an ending that could have felt too pat instead resonate in a thematically satisfying way.

(One nice thing about a series of novellas that can be read in any order is that if you miss one, you're not lost. On the other hand, HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING it's easy to go read book five and then remember you never read book four. Just saying.)

"Will I dishonor Cleric Thien's memory, their chosen life and their work, and allow them to be buried under a name that is no longer their own? Is that what you are asking me?"

This is a bonus gender observation, but one thing that works really well for me specifically and that intersects neatly with the themes of change and grief is that the core of this story is a conflict over identity and deadnaming[*]. Cleric Chih comes back to find that the old Divine, Cleric Thien, has died. Thien's grandchildren have come along with mammoths to forcibly take Thien's body back home with them, while Singing Hills wants the body to stay and honor Thien's life work as a cleric.

Despite all clerics using they/them pronouns, these grandchildren Tui In Hao and Vee In Yee both continually refer to Cleric Thien as "grandfather" and "he" throughout. They also go out of their way to deride Cleric Thien's award-winning scholarly work (with a side of fantasy racism). If this conflict over identity wasn't clear enough (or for readers who maybe aren't hyperaware of pronouns and gendered language), Cleric Chih even explicitly chides these two that Thien was "not a man, a cleric".

[*] A tangent tangent, but I mean deadnaming here in what feels to me to be the original sense of the term--it's not just using the wrong name under any circumstance, but more specifically it's the threat of being buried and eulogized under the wrong name by spiteful and unsupportive family.

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