Into the Riverlands

Stories come in all lengths and are spawned from all sorts of ideas, but sometimes all you need to tell a really good one is a creative mind, a bit of inspiration, and a few short pages to write it on. With Into the Riverlands, Nghi Vo tells a short fable with surprisingly deep lore which absolutely begs to be explored with further books, and the format makes it a perfect short read that you can pick up whenever you feel the urge. For me, an hour with this book at bedtime was a positive ending to my day that I realized I could use a lot more of.

It's tempting to wonder why The Singing Hills Cycle, like other series of novellas, couldn't fit into a single, larger novel instead, but the very theme of this book lends itself to short bursts show more of creativity. It seems to me that Nghi writes novellas in the same way she is inspired, putting as much on the page as her burst of creativity will allow at its peak and never allowing the story to overstay its purpose. In a hundred pages or less you have a novella featuring lovable characters with distinct personalities, clear motivations for every one, and just enough action to balance the exposition.

A novella with padding is an idea too small to be interesting, but in this case, I feel like there is a larger story absolutely screaming to be released into the wild with only its very best aspects making it to the page. There is even enough room to have a chapter dedicated to a historical story within the story, and it all works together to create a novella of the perfect length. I was astounded at how much story could fit into this when I thought back on it the next day, but perhaps the lack of useless padding has helped me retain the big picture and remember more of it.

Of course I wish it was longer, but never at the expense of great storytelling. This novella knows exactly what it is, a burst of creativity that leaves you wishing it could keep going but ending where it needs to. By writing this series of inspiring novellas, Nghi has allowed this series to continue for as long as she feels the urge to write it and has eliminated the need for filler by focusing on each novella as its own story. In its own short way, this is a series which has mastered longevity.

Thanks to Nghi Vo and Tordotcom for providing me with a review copy, it was very much appreciated. show less

Cleric Chih and their little friend Almost Brilliant are back. This time they find themselves sucked into a mini martial-arts epic, where the intellectual depth comes from considering the unreliability of memory, and how people would prefer to be remembered. This iteration continues to be charming, while at the same time being a little more smart-ass than the first two stories in the cycle.

This one was short and sweet for me. I'm not usually so into a martial arts-heavy book, but maybe that's just because the martial artist is usually not a woman. I loved that Almost Brilliant was such a fangirl over Wei.What I love most about the Singing Hills Cycle is the way it interrogates legends and folk tales. Again and again, the series asks not whether a story is true, but who benefits from telling it. Into the Riverlands delivers that in spades.The many disconnected stories slowly weaving themselves into something larger felt quintessentially Singing Hills in the best way.

The third installment in the Singing Hills universe is a kind of alchemy. At first Chih seems to be collecting an assortment of unrelated tales from a group of people they have fallen in with more or less by chance. But soon, patterns emerge, and the stories have more in common than a setting, and the role of beauty or the absence thereof in a story.

Like all of the Singing Hills books, this has a lot to say about how stories shift, are shaped and colored by the teller — both their viewpoints and biases at the time of the story, and what the events have meant to them in the years after.

I wish Tor would release these all as matching paperbacks! I would snatch them up so fast!

Oh, what a fun series! This installment is a bit more "out there" than the previous two (I can't imagine reading this with no prior knowledge of xianxia; the entire novella is one epic xianxia at remove [through Chih's eyes]). But it's still everything I love about the Singing Hills Cycle.

Representation:
- the main character, Chih, uses they/them pronouns
- every character is from this world's alternate Asia (for example, Mac Khanh and Mac Sang are almost outright stated to be Vietnamese, while I'm pretty sure Wei Jintai is Chinese, etc.)
- knowing these books, I'm going to guess that two of the secondary characters are also wlw

Cleric Chih and her companion Almost Brilliant, a bird with a perfect memory, travel through the riverlands in show more search of stories. But although they will get their stories, they also become involved in ancient feuds between master martial artist cultivators.

In a change of tone from the previous two books, this one—for the most part—was so fun! The battle scenes were very much written in xianxia style and were easy to picture. Even if we are watching all of these scenes through the eyes of someone who never actually takes part in the battles themselves, and who sometimes watches them a little distantly because of fear, I feel like they're done really well. I also really like this unique perspective, that the main character isn't the fighter but just the one who watches and records.

The incorporation of the main story in this one was fantastic (and actually quite in love with the story of Wild Pig Yi, Beautiful Nie, and Gravewaith Chen), and the mention of "ugly women stories" made me smile.

Like the first novella, this one has an ending that makes you think for a second and look back to earlier parts. It's just a wonderful story containing multiples. Great art. show less

2 years after the publication of the second novella in the series comes the third and we meet Chih and their talking neixin Almost Brilliant again (and Almost Brilliant is even more amusing than in the previous novellas). This time our traveling monk/cleric/historian is headed to the Riverlands to try to record the stories of the apparently immortal martial artists of the area. Just as it happened in the previous novellas and as it happens often in life, there were other people traveling the same route - so they decided to travel together and while traveling, some stories got told (and some battles happened).

I'd admit that I was not sure where this novella was going until almost the middle - the language and the style looked different show more from the lyrical tales that preceded it. There was a reason for that of course and once the stories of the new companions started to get hinted at, things started to fall into place. Part of the difference came from the setting - the open road replaced the much more confined locations of the previous 2 novellas. Which made me stop and wonder - would the start have bothered me as much if I had never read the first two novellas - was my unease because it was different or because it was generally weaker indeed. I am not sure I can answer that one truthfully.

It also seems like Chih is getting more and more involved with the stories they are collecting - from the almost passivity of the first tale through the tigers to here, there is a gradation (which also corresponds with Almost Brilliant getting more and more entertaining). I am not sure if that is leading to a change in the cycle or we are just seeing the author finding her voice more and more. But the result is a lot livelier and adventurous novella than the preceding ones. Which does not make it necessarily better than them - or worse. Just different. show less

Into the Riverlands is the third book of the Singing Hills Cycle and it was a great addition. I loved getting to walk alongside Cleric Chih again as they travel the world collecting stories for the Singing Hills Monastery. The story opens when Chih meets a pair of young women traveling together who run into trouble with a thug in a waystation tea house. Chih tries to defend them only to find out that they don’t need help at all. A Kung Fu adept, Wei Jintai, is more than capable of handling herself.
They join two other travelers and find themselves in the middle of an adventure with people who might just be more than they seem to be.
This was such a cool exploration of legendary heroes living in plain sight and about deciding who we want show more to be known as. I just love this series. The fourth one has just come out and I’m second on the hold list for it. If you haven’t tried this series you don’t know what you’re missing. They’re bite size novellas and they’re awesome. Start with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. show less