When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

From Locus and Ignyte finalist, Crawford Award winner, and bestselling author Nghi Vo comes the second installment in a Hugo Award-winning series "A stunning gem of a novella that explores the complexity and layers of storytelling and celebrates the wonder of queer love. I could read about Chih recording tales forever."—Samantha Shannon, New York Times bestselling author of The Priory of the Orange Tree "Dangerous, subtle, unexpected and familiar, angry and ferocious and hopeful. . . . The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a remarkable accomplishment of storytelling."—NPR The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache with hunger. To stay alive until the mammoths can save them, Chih must unwind the intricate, layered story of the tiger and her scholar lover—a woman of courage, intelligence, and beauty—and discover how truth can survive becoming history. Nghi Vo returns to the empire of Ahn and The Singing Hills Cycle in When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, a mesmerizing, lush standalone follow-up to The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The Hugo Award-winning Singing Hills Cycle The Empress of Salt and Fortune When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain Into the Riverlands 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 entry point.

After loving Empress of Salt and Fortune earlier in the year and just wanting more of the story, I was very excited when I saw the announcement for this sequel and even more happy when I got the ARC. And this one turned out to be even better than I thought.

I think I did the right thing listening to the audiobook of the first book just last week, because it refreshed my memory of this world and it made me feel connected to this story immediately. As storytelling forms the main narrative of this novella, the author uses her poetic and beautiful writing style to weave a story within a story, while also keeping up the tension taut and us readers hooked to every single word. I was lost to the mesmerizing words and didn't even realize that the book was almost over. The book is quite fast paced, the story that Chih is narrating builds up slowly and I was quite excited to know what was gonna happen next, and all characters had very interesting personalities. The banter between them was also absolutely perfect and I had such a fun time reading the book even when it was intense.

I loved the themes that the author was trying to convey with this narrative. I have found many books in recent times deal with the concept of truth and fact, whose truth gets to be told as history and passed on across generations, and what other narratives are lost. In a similar vein, the author here tries to showcase how the same history of a scholar/Tiger couple can be told in different ways based on who is doing the narrating, and the version which gets archived for posterity depends on who controls the scholarly domain. I think this is very relevant to our current times as well and I enjoyed the way the author imparts us this message through the narration of a love story.

To conclude, this novella is storytelling at its finest, very captivating in tone, and beautiful in the imagery. I'm now more in love with this world and the author than I was before, and I hope we get more books in the Singing Hills series. And if you are someone who loves stories, you just can't miss this masterpiece.

It's a very delightful thing to read Nghi Vo's work. I haven't read anything like it before. The writing is delicate and remarkable and deserves to be read carefully and with attention to detail.

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r/fantasy Bingo Card 2021: Trans Or Nonbinary Character

What's with all these novellas! A 2 hour story is waste of my time! 1 star for this.

Not sure how this ties in to the first in the series, maybe the cleric in the story? Nothing else is sounding familiar.

Other than these, it seems well written so giving it an extra 2 stars.

The beginning and end of this is a little bit of a jumble. It's hard to understand what exactly happened in the struggle. But the major part of this story was great. Chih telling the tigers the story of the woman who fell in love with the tiger was very entertaining as well as a great tool to teach inconsistent storytelling.

Although I choose to believe the tiger's story there is really no way to know which one really happened. And I think that is kinda the point. The interaction between Chih and the tigers was also pretty funny at times, you forget a little that they would kill them at any moment.