The Fox Wife

• Author: Yangsze Choo
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: February 13, 2024
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

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

Manchuria, 1908.

A young woman is found frozen in the snow. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes involved, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and men. Bao, a detective with a reputation for sniffing 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 that owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments, but not the curse that afflicts them―their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. Now the only grandson of the family is twenty-three. When a mysterious woman enters their household, their luck seems to change. Or does it? Is their new servant a simple young woman from the north or a fox spirit bent on her own revenge?

New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about a winter full of mysterious deaths, a mother seeking revenge, and old folktales that may very well be true.

I read a previous book of Choo’s (The Night Tiger), also in audiobook format, and rated it the same. However, it was a while ago, so I didn’t make the connection until just now that it isn’t the author and it certainly isn’t the stories, but I think it is the format that isn’t working well for me. 

To start with, the author narrated the audiobook, which was one of the biggest appeals of the audiobook for me. Another was the fact that I could hear the proper pronunciation of the Chinese names and words that I was sure would be included in the story, but to my surprise, Japanese culture and society as well as Mongolian to some degree also played a role in this book. And while I was familiar a little with kitsune, (thanks Julie Kagawa), I went into this book with no understanding of how foxes play a role in other East Asian cultures. 

Having read one of Choo’s books already, I had a heads up of what to expect. I was prepared for a slower paced meander through the story, rather than a fast-paced race of a tale. The slow pace of the story allows readers to really delve into the characters and their stories and really get to know them. I normally don’t like slow-paced stories, but the way that Choo layers the history, culture, society, and the expectations of the times, and then adds in the mythology in such a way that it feels more like magical realism than fantasy. 

The story is told between two POV characters, a woman who is named Snow but is called Ah San, and an older detective named Bao. While there are a couple of mysteries woven into this story, that isn’t really where the strength lies. The mysteries aren’t overly complicated, I figured them out far in advance, but the real strength lies in her ability to spin a story that pulls you in and keeps you reading just to see what the characters will do and say next, and more importantly, how they are going to react to these big revelations, which are practically anticlimactic when compared to how the reveals create growth and change in the characters. 

I was prepared for the slow pace, and enjoyed having the author narrate the story. She has a clear and precise way of speaking, and a crisp British accent. Her narration gave the story a more personal feel, although having to read this in audio format was probably not the best medium for me. In this case, I think having the book to savor would have made this more enjoyable for me. While listening to this book, I found myself having to focus intensely, often replaying sections or entire chapters because I have a tendency to lose focus. Again, this is not a problem with the book, more of a disconnect between me and the format. There’s just something about this kind of story that calls for a physical book. But her stories are enjoyable enough that I keep coming back and trying them, and learning more about Asian cultures through various lenses, including this author who is a fourth-generation Malaysian of Chinese ethnicity. So my recommendation is to either enjoy this one with the book in front of you, or chance the audiobook, but only if you can really focus while listening to an audiobook.

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