Underwhelming: a review of The Fox Wife

There's a lot of potential in this book, but it goes largely unrealized. It offers some good ideas to chew on. It interacts with interesting feminist themes. There are a few characters with sufficient depth. There are rich historical and mythological angles to explore. The novel has plenty of positive elements, but in its entirety, it's somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

The story unfolds at an excruciatingly slow pace with lengthy scenes that build zero tension. The meandering structure leaves everything feeling muted. One of the main characters, Snow, is a mysterious fox spirit out for answers and revenge after a recent loss in her life. The other protagonist, Bao, is a detective tasked with solving what looks like a crime caused by fox spirits. Both characters should have incredibly strong and clashing motivations, but none of the emotional or plot beats resonate. The characters just go from one place to the next. There's little momentum to carry the story. The narrative gets stuck on random subplots that do nothing other than introduce a bunch of shallow and predictable side characters.

Part of the problem is that Bao is temporally behind the rest of the story. It makes his storyline feel frustratingly pointless. The flashbacks to his childhood are alright, but when he's interacting with the central mystery in the present, it's repetitive and anticlimactic. Most of the questions are already answered in Snow's chapters.

My guess is that the book is prioritizing mood over plot or character development, but the prose -- while serviceable -- is too uninspired, and as a result, I thought the atmosphere was dull. I've see reviewers saying they thought the prose was lyrical, and I disagree. Maybe I'm missing something, so take what I say with a grain of salt here, but for me, the prose is clipped and pedestrian. There are noteworthy stylistic choices (like footnotes and personal perspective switches), but these elements aren't used meaningfully. The stylization is thankfully not gimmicky, but it's not effective either. It's just kind of there, which incidentally sums up my feelings about the entire book. It's just kind of there.