The Brides Of High Hill - Nghi Vo
- Publisher – St. Martin's Press
- Published – 2024
- Price – £16.99 hardback | £8.54 Kindle
The Singing Hills Cycle continues with book 5 in the series, and aside from a brief wobble with the third installment (Into The Riverlands) these books have consistently been my favourite reads of the past year. They also seem to get better with each new book, which is incredible. After finishing Mammoths At The Gates I didn't think there was any way for Vo to top it, and thought that I would have been happy for the series to end there. How wrong I was.
Here's the blurb for this one:
The Cleric Chih accompanies a beautiful young bride to her wedding to the aging ruler of a crumbling estate situated at the crossroads of dead empires. The bride's party is welcomed with elaborate courtesies and extravagant banquets, but between the frightened servants and the cryptic warnings of the lord's mad son, they quickly realize that something is haunting the shadowed halls.
As Chih and the bride-to-be explore empty rooms and desolate courtyards, they are drawn into the mystery of what became of Lord Guo's previous wives and the dark history of Doi Cao itself. But as the wedding night draws to its close, Chih will learn at their peril that not all monsters are to be found in the shadows; some monsters hide in plain sight.
This book is like a magic trick, and it's hard to talk about exactly what's so great about it without spoiling things. Vo tricks us into believing things about the story that aren't true, in the same way that Chih is tricked. When things finally begin to become clear for Chih I also had a moment of clarity about what was going on. I found myself turning back to the first chapter to remember where the story had began, and it was in doing that that I realised there were fundamental truths about the story I was reading that had changed over the course of the telling of it, so subtly that I hadn't noticed.
The only weakness of this series for me so far has been in Vo's action scenes, and it seems that she's put some work in there. There are a couple of moments of violence in this installment but, unlike in the earlier books, the quality of the writing never falters for a second. Vo leans heavily into the dark and the gothic and there are moments of real horror here. Tonally this is as far removed from The Empress of Salt and Fortune as it's possible to get, and I continue to be amazed that Vo manages to play in so many different genre pools while still having these stories feel like a cohesive whole.
This is fantastic, and I can't wait to see what comes next.
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