Review copy provided by the publisher.
Welllll, I bet Vo wishes this was less topical.
Given the time it takes to put a book through production, she was clearly thinking about refugees and their treatment with the cohort of us who knew that it was a crucial world political issue before the early months of 2026. But now here we are, and hey, look! A protagonist who is sensitive to and helping refugees without requiring them to be moral paragons! Everybody buy two copies and pass them around, its time has come.
I am not being sarcastic.
This is the latest in the Singing Hills Cycle, which is the chronicles of Cleric Chih and their memory hoopoe, Almost Brilliant. It is a perfectly good entry point to the series–you will smoothly and swiftly find out who these people are, what they’re up to, and why you should care, and then you can circle back and read the others as you can find them. (They’re still in print, but we live in parlous times etc.) And while the plight of refugees is not exactly an upbeat topic, the different volumes have different levels of harrowing, and this is definitely on the less-harrowing end, which often makes for a good starting point. (Again parlous times.) I’m glad this series is ongoing, and I’m glad this is the way it’s going on.