Foxes, Friends and Fate
Mar. 8th, 2026 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo follows Snow, a fox spirit, and Bao, a private detective, who are tracking the same man across China and Japan in 1908. Overall, it's a complex, layered, involving tale about family connections, folktales and second chances.
The narrative is split between the two protagonists, with Snow's tale written in the past tense and Bao's tale in the present tense - and I couldn't figure out why this decision was made, since they take place at the same time.
Also, for most of the book, the chapters are very short (3-5 pages) - which is usually a technique for thrillers to increase the pace but, here, it actually has the opposite effect, since it makes it feel like we're not getting anywhere in either storyline. It felt very slow to me, and also a bit repetitive by the end.
I did love how the two stories eventually came together, though, and the ending was both surprising and satisfying in a way that made me glad I'd persevered and left a positive impression of the book in my mind.
Friends Like These by Kimberly McCreight is a thriller and those can easily go either way for me. It wasn't a great start, with eight different viewpoint characters, four different timelines and two different tenses (unevenly applied) - all a bit much. I also only really liked one of the characters (the detective) and even she felt overwritten in terms of her backstory and reactions to things.
But I was intrigued by the story - a group of rich university friends gathering in a remote house with lots of different secrets bubbling under the surface and one already dead and one missing before the book even started. And it did keep me reading (I finished it in three days) - though the main twist felt like it came out of nowhere and was quite annoying.
But the very end, with what happened to the detective, was great on multiple levels and thus edged it more into a positive than a negative review.
The Measure by Nikki Erlick is a thought experiment with the premise that, one day, everyone in the world wakes up to find a box on their doorstep, which contains a string showing how long their life will be. Moving on from that concept, it explores a lot of really interesting ideas about what would happen and how this would affect the world, along with following the individual stories of multiple characters, mostly based in New York.
I really liked a lot of the speculation here, especially when I would think, "But what about...?" and then the book would almost immediately answer that question.
But, at least for the first two thirds or so, it did feel much more like an intellectual exercise than a proper story, with the characters largely just tacked on top of the wider discussion of the ramifications of the situation. Every few chapters, it would introduce a new viewpoint character with a multi-page summary of their life up to receiving their box, and then later, another summary of their life since receiving their box, before folding them properly into the plot. This meant we got the first few months of life after the arrival of the boxes over and over again, and the reportage style made it feel more like a series of character studies than a layered story.
That said, things definitely got more emotive and more involving in the latter sections, with the narrative focusing more on direct action and interaction between the characters - and the end definitely got me in the feels on multiple levels. Though the epilogue did run like those text cards you get at the end of films based on a true story, where it lists what happened to the various people...
The narrative is split between the two protagonists, with Snow's tale written in the past tense and Bao's tale in the present tense - and I couldn't figure out why this decision was made, since they take place at the same time.
Also, for most of the book, the chapters are very short (3-5 pages) - which is usually a technique for thrillers to increase the pace but, here, it actually has the opposite effect, since it makes it feel like we're not getting anywhere in either storyline. It felt very slow to me, and also a bit repetitive by the end.
I did love how the two stories eventually came together, though, and the ending was both surprising and satisfying in a way that made me glad I'd persevered and left a positive impression of the book in my mind.
Friends Like These by Kimberly McCreight is a thriller and those can easily go either way for me. It wasn't a great start, with eight different viewpoint characters, four different timelines and two different tenses (unevenly applied) - all a bit much. I also only really liked one of the characters (the detective) and even she felt overwritten in terms of her backstory and reactions to things.
But I was intrigued by the story - a group of rich university friends gathering in a remote house with lots of different secrets bubbling under the surface and one already dead and one missing before the book even started. And it did keep me reading (I finished it in three days) - though the main twist felt like it came out of nowhere and was quite annoying.
But the very end, with what happened to the detective, was great on multiple levels and thus edged it more into a positive than a negative review.
The Measure by Nikki Erlick is a thought experiment with the premise that, one day, everyone in the world wakes up to find a box on their doorstep, which contains a string showing how long their life will be. Moving on from that concept, it explores a lot of really interesting ideas about what would happen and how this would affect the world, along with following the individual stories of multiple characters, mostly based in New York.
I really liked a lot of the speculation here, especially when I would think, "But what about...?" and then the book would almost immediately answer that question.
But, at least for the first two thirds or so, it did feel much more like an intellectual exercise than a proper story, with the characters largely just tacked on top of the wider discussion of the ramifications of the situation. Every few chapters, it would introduce a new viewpoint character with a multi-page summary of their life up to receiving their box, and then later, another summary of their life since receiving their box, before folding them properly into the plot. This meant we got the first few months of life after the arrival of the boxes over and over again, and the reportage style made it feel more like a series of character studies than a layered story.
That said, things definitely got more emotive and more involving in the latter sections, with the narrative focusing more on direct action and interaction between the characters - and the end definitely got me in the feels on multiple levels. Though the epilogue did run like those text cards you get at the end of films based on a true story, where it lists what happened to the various people...
