TITLE: Mammoths at the Gates (Singing Hills Cycle #4)
AUTHOR: Nghi Vo
128 pages, TorDotCom Publishing, ISBN 9781250851437 (hardcover, also e-book and audio)
MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5
Mammoths at the Gates, the fourth novella in Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle, finally introduces readers to Cleric Chih’s home monastery. Chih’s return to Singing Hills is not as joyous as it should be. Chih’s mentor, Cleric Thien, has passed away. Most of the monastery inhabitants are away studying a recently uncovered flooded city. And Singing Hills is being threatened by the granddaughters of Cleric Thien, who want their grandfather’s remains to lie in state, because of his high status as clan head before becoming a Cleric and be buried alongside their recently deceased grandmother. Chih must find a way to help the acting head of the monastery, who also happens to be Chih’s childhood best friend Ru, deal with the granddaughters while honoring Thien’s memory and teachings under the traditions of Singing Hills.
Mammoths at the Gates is one of several books I’ve read recently that delve into the myriad ways in which we process grief and loss. Both Chih and Ru exhibit behaviors I found very familiar as they process their loss: the great outpouring of emotion only when alone or with the closest of friends, and the using of work, even if it’s just “busy work,” to blunt the raw emotions enough to get through the days/weeks that follow the loss. But while for Chih keeping busy is a choice, for Ru it is a requirement; as acting head of Singing Hills Ru must attend to the visitors at the gates as well as the day-to-day operations of the monastery. Vo also expertly addresses the swings that happen from recalling happy memories to recognizing the reality that the person is truly gone, including those moments when we “hear” the person, or “see” them out of the corner of our eye and think for a moment that maybe news of their passing was incorrect … or those moments when we simply forget the person is gone.
By contrast, there is Thien’s avian companion Many Virtues. In the Singing Hills Cycle, Cleric are accompanied by neixin, birds with infallible memory – they recall everything they see and hear, which makes them amazing repositories of world history, legend, and the details of an individual’s life. The bond between Cleric and neixin is indelible and deep. Through Many Virtues, Vo explores what happens when our sense of loss is so profound we cannot imagine continuing to live without the one we’ve lost, and how sometimes that leads to self-harm (off-screen, in this case).
Through Thien’s granddaughters, Vo also looks at the way we sometimes mourn an idea rather than a real person. These granddaughters didn’t actually know their grandfather. But they were brought up on stories of his career and they say the palpable love their grandmother held for their grandfather even after he’d become a Cleric. But they still mourn the loss as though they knew him directly, mirroring the way in our world we mourn the passing of celebrities we’ve never actually met as though we knew them intimately.
Vo also comments on the cultural/societal ways in which we “say goodbye,” the rituals that are attached to acknowledging a person’s passing and the impact they had on our lives. I found Singing Hills’ ceremony, one of storytelling about the deceased with a touch of ritual rather than one focused more on the ritual than the person, to be sweet and ideal, providing some of the most poignant moments of the book.
Chih also must navigate the changes in their relationship with Run. As a traveling Cleric, Chih has been away from the monastery more than they have been present, while for reasons of health Ru has not been able to travel and has had to forge a life in the absence of their best friend. Watching Chih reconcile the past with the present was a bit uncomfortable at times but was important for both characters.
Even though this is the fourth book in the series, the Singing Hills novellas are all stand-alone. So even if you haven’t read the preceding three books you can pick up Mammoths at the Gates and quickly understand Cleric Chih and their world. For those that have read the earlier novellas, there are oblique references to those events that will tantalize without making new readers feel like they are missing vital information. (And the fifth Singing Hills Cycle entry, The Brides of High Hall, comes out on May 7, 2024!)
I previously reviewed book three in the Singing Hills Cycle, Into the Riverlands, as well as Nghi Vo’s standalone novel The Chosen and the Beautiful.
I received an advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.