Mammoths at the Gates

It was good to return to the Singing Hills Cycle — and to see the actual Singing Hills this time! The writing is lyrical as Nghi Vo’s has been for the other nivelkas in this series, and this time the picture they paint is about grief and change.

We meet Chih’s childhood best friend, Ru, who they have grown apart from some as their lives took different paths. We meet the memory of Cleric Thien, being laid to rest as they died recently. We meet Thien’s granddaughters, who never knew them but have come on the account of their recently deceased grandmother. And we meet Almost Brilliant’s chick.

There’s a lot of quiet tension here, between the conflict between the clerics and the granddaughters, the things you discover about someone cleaning up what they left behind, and the grief that comes with change as well as loss, but the journey makes for a story that will linger with me.

I liked this book better than its predecessor in the series, Into the Riverlands, because of its emphasis on the interactions of individuals and their memories. Riverlands was an emphasis on the local stories the cleric was collecting and less time spent on the group being travelled with.

In Mammoths I did have alot of confusion keeping track of who was talking when the word 'they' was being used. I interpreted this to be a community of individuals that refer to themselves as they/them, which means 'they' could mean the individual doing the speaking or could mean another person being spoken of, in the same sentence.

This confusion didn't detract from my enjoyment of the story or the characters.