Listened to the audiobook with Cindy Kay – good narrator as with the previous instalments.

In my reviews of both The Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain I praised the format of the Singing Hills Cycle and I will continue to do so here: I really like the novella format for the speculative genre and I think it could be explored more.

Clearly, the challenge in short-form speculative fiction is that there is less space for worldbuilding alongside everything else, and that forces the writer to make choices (and it forces the reader to fill in more of the gaps themselves). That difficulty is what I think kept the Murderbot Diaries from winning me over entirely.

Vo has not made it easy for herself with the structure of the Singing Hills Cycle, combining both frame narrative and main story in the space of the novella. Over the series, I feel the balance between the frame narrative and the story inside the frame is shifting. And Into the Riverlands occupies an interesting place in that.

While the characters in the novella tell each other stories in an almost The Canterbury Tales-esque fashion, the novella is very much about what occurs to Chih and her travelling companions in the ‘frame narrative’. The stories the characters tell each other are there to support that main story.

I understand the move towards a narrative that focusses on the recurring main character and I look forward to getting to know Chih and Almost Brilliant better.

So Into the Riverlands sits in an awkward transitional spot where the back-and-forth between the stories can be messy. At the same time, I think Vo uses that the transitional tale very well. Vo really leans into the unreliable narrator-trope by having her characters ask questions about the origin and the different versions of the stories they tell.

And I should not give the impression with all that analysis that the story of Into the Riverlands is not worth reading; it certainly is! I really like that Into the Riverlands, even better than The Empress of Salt and Fortune, ties the different stories in the novella together. Into the Riverlands has a number of evocative atmospheric scenes and Vo delivers another satisfying twist at the end of the story.

With Into the Riverlands, Vo proves that she is a master of the novella. She shows that she keeps reinventing the Singing Hills Cycle – and to give a sneak peak of Mammoths at the Gates, which, yes, I’ve already started: that exploration will continue. I certainly hope that Nghi Vo will continue to bring us novellas like these, because I will keep eating them up!