The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo (Henry Holt and Company)

“I exist as either a small canid…or a young woman. Neither are safe forms in a world run by men.” Snow, however, is well equipped to defend herself whether she takes the form of a beautiful woman or a fox. Unfortunately her daughter is not. When the fox cub is captured by a photographer to sell on the open market, the baby is easily broken. By the time Snow finds her, the child is ready to die.

Now Snow is out for revenge, taking her human form to find the man who is responsible for her baby’s death. Her quest takes her to the home of an old woman whose son is a photographer and who knows the murderer. This old woman is attracted to something within Snow, an indefinable quality that reminds her of a fox she encountered long ago in the northern grasslands. She hires this enigmatic beauty to be her maid servant and companion.

Bao is an elderly man who long ago was taken to a fox shrine to save his life and ever after is a lie detector in human form. He can immediately distinguish truth from lies the minute the words are spoken. “Truth is a green garden hedged thickly with bamboo that he can’t escape.” He uses this blessing and curse in his work as a detective, a job that puts him on the path of a beautiful young woman who might be a fox. While on his hunt, he always keeps an eye out for the woman he loved when he was young, a girl who claimed she had once been rescued by a fox.

The Fox Wife suddenly becomes a mystery based upon myth, where three foxes find each other, all of them linked through time, history, love, and tragedy. Yangsze Choo makes them not only plausible, but absolutely possible and completely desirable. “We make our living beguiling people,” Snow says and anyone who picks up this book is certain to be beguiled.

Ancient Chinese stories, Choo explains in notes at the end of her book, were augmented by footnotes and in this book, she had wanted to include footnotes written by Snow. Instead she gives tidbits of information sprinkled throughout her novel and within her closing notes. Foxes are recognized as magical shape-shifters in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, beings that are capable of pursuing a thousand-year journey toward becoming celestial foxes. While on that journey they are known to humans as spirits, demons, and gods. 

First mentioned in the Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a work of Chinese literature that dates back to the 4th Century B.C., foxes were believed to have the power to become a woman at fifty, a beautiful woman or an adult male at one hundred, with the ability “to know things more than at a thousand miles distance.” They could use sorcery to kill or to “possess and bewilder,” and often were the presiding spirit of villages.

Even without these historical facts, Snow’s story is skillfully interlaced with Bao’s in a novel that’s poetic, romantic, and steeped in adventure. Trapped in neither mystery nor fantasy, The Fox Wife brings a new depth to fiction, along with a yearning for a sequel—with footnotes.~Janet Brown