Breakaway Books

Authored by Yangsze Choo; Published February 2024; Fantasy/Mystery

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

There is such a thing as a vibes mystery novel. Among my personal favorites are Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache series, set in snowy Quebec, Canada. The Fox Wife reminded me a little of that–it’s a gentler kind of mystery, based in legend. So gentle, in fact I debated whether to call it a mystery at all.

I can’t say that there is a lot of action in this book–it basically feels like spending a few days with the hero and heroine of the novel, Bao and Snow, as they unravel a series of murders. You get to know what makes them tick, how they view the world and why they’ve made the decisions that they’ve made. They struggle with grieving, growing old, and the necessities of marriage in the early twentieth century.

Knowing very little about the myth of foxes from which the book draws inspiration, I don’t know if this is a unique treatment of them, but I found them to be a source of joy in this novel. Full of supernatural power, yet often foolish or even clownish, a lot of the forward movement in the novel is because of the foxes’ ill-thought out actions. In a novel with just a slightly lighter tone, they would be a comedy of errors.

In terms of suspense, the novel was more of a meandering walk through the countryside than a fast-paced sprint to the finish line, but by the final chapters, I found myself eagerly anticipating the long-awaited meeting between Bao and his long-lost love. What pulled me along more than wanting to figure out the final twist was wanting to see the characters settled and happy.

To me, this is a great book to curl up with on a cozy winter night with a mug of something warm and comforting, because in the end, that’s what the book was to me: warm and comforting.