A deeply unsettling addition to the series, bringing the connecting thread of food up to the forefront of the story.
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| Cover art by Alyssa Winans |
TW: discussion of cannibalism
In the Singing Hills Cycle books, Nghi Vo has always been interested in food. Everywhere Cleric Chih goes, they linger on tastes - whether new and exciting or ones fondly remembered but unavailable tastes of home. It is one of the driving constants in a series defined by a new structural or thematic conceit in every volume, and one that I have remarked upon in previous reviews of the series here. So it is interesting and satisfying that food and famine are the core theme of this, the newest book in the series.
Chih has headed to the town of Baolin, famous for its sweet pork dish and for the famine that harrowed the people there some eighteen years before. On the way, they find some remains that could be human, a hint of unsettling things to come. With their neixin, Almost Brilliant, for company, Chih settles in to ask the people they meet to share their experiences of the famine time, and of their lives, starting with a young man, Li Shui, at a restaurant serving the celebrated Baolin pork. Vo lingers in this starting segment on the sensory experience of the food - which Li Shui gives them to sample - before bringing us to the story that goes along with it. Famine, in Baolin, is a physical, embodied thing, a gigantic demon that haunted the landscape, and whom Li Shui's mother escaped by her wits. Only a few pages in, and there's already a sense of the shape of things - food and its absence both as tangible experiences, the overwhelming physicality of them, playing with metaphor made real - right up until the narrative is thrown a little off the rails. The local magistrate clearly doesn't want Chih poking into stories of the famine, and so insists they come stay at his house, and conduct their interviews under his auspices. Here, trapped in a polite prison, Chih begins to see the realities, and legacy, of the famine, and to uncover things still buried from long ago.
As the sixth book in the series, it is hard to avoid comparing this with what came before, and it's an urge I'm not going to resist. If parallels exist, the closest I find for A Mouthful of Dust is the previous entry, The Brides of High Hill. I'll come to a second part of this comparison shortly, but the first thing that links them, the most prominent, immediately grasped connection, is how unsettling they both are, how creepy. While the Singing Hills books have never shied away from a little bit of darkness, these two particularly seem to bring it to the surface and make a virtue of it, A Mouthful of Dust even more intensely than its predecessor. In the use of the demon, and the dwelling - because there is a lot of dwelling - on the famine and its lingering effects in the people of Baolin, Vo has ratcheted up the atmosphere into something palpably oppressive and foregrounded in the story. It works exactly because it's an apotheosis of a theme that has been present throughout the rest of the series, but has been twisted from homely comfort into something nasty.
Frankly, one of the best things about this as a book is how well Vo talks about hunger, famine and how traumatic events like that live on beyond their immediate scope. I was particularly struck with the idea of the clay cookies, which people ate to try to stave off their hunger pangs, and which some of the survivors, now in a time of plenty again, still eat (and from which the title comes). Something about it being such a small thing, a thing that persists afterwards felt... raw.
And part of how well she talks about it is... well it's the cannibalism. Chih - and the narrative more broadly - is simultaneously both horrified and blasé about people resorting to cannibalism in hard times. It is treated as a terrible thing - an extreme thing that comes to humans at the end of the tether of survival - but also something wildly un-unique in the scope of the world's history that Chih, and the Abbey they represent, document and preserve. The rolls and stories are full of incidents of it, they say. Humanity has been driven to this extreme sufficiently often for it to be predictable. That is the true horror of it, that this kind of extremity and taboo can become the usual run of order. Vo takes pains to linger on that, to return to it as a touchstone, and it works very, very well. The demon may embody this horror, but its power comes from the distinctly non-magical parts of its makeup.
There are other strengths too, though none of them surprising to readers who have been along with the series the whole way. Vo continues to have a deft hand at worldbuilding, using offhand details to give us glimpses of greater depth, for example, when describing the magistrate:
His face was hard and still as stone, just a touch of dark makeup at his eyes and his temples to give him a distinguished air.
In one sentence, she gives us both a physical description of the man, makes us aware of a key manner of his presentation, and contextualises that presentation in the wider world. This is a world in which men of his station wear small amounts of makeup and that is a thing that allows them to look distinguished. It's a small thing, but it does wonders for giving a feel-sense of the shape of the world, especially when such moments are plentifully peppered throughout the novella as they are. Vo gives such a sense of the world as peopled, and those people as varied, and part of cultures, groups, families and geographies, and it that focus on the human that really makes this series sing.
Likewise, the breezy pleasantness of character portraits, the casual camaraderie between Chih and Almost Brilliant, the neat little portraits of the characters who come into and out of the story lens, and the way storytelling within the story is deployed to craft atmosphere, all of these are familiar tools in Vo's toolbox, and put well to use here again.
But... there is a but, and this is my second part of the comparison too... for all that there is much to like about this story, it falters a little when compared to what has come before. The Brides of High Hill, too, struggled under the weight of the structural expectations set by the preceding books, and A Mouthful of Dust suffers the same burden. We had four books which each had a clear, neat, structural conceit that distinguished them from their fellows, and from other novellas in the market. There was a clear USP, and my god it was good. But where The Brides of High Hill had still something that we could maybe squint at and see in it a relationship to those conceits, A Mouthful of Dust seems to have stepped away entirely. I find myself scrambling to try to find one, to conjure up a theory of one, but nothing comes. It's a well told story, but the problem all series must face is that each entry has to sit amongst its fellows, and live as part of the whole, as much as it can be a singular object. And it is here where A Mouthful of Dust fails for me.
The way I see it, series can go in one of two ways - either there can be some form of overarching plot/narrative/growth/change, something that drives along through and underneath each entry, pushing the series towards some sort of catharsis or ending, or there's a pattern, something that unifies the disparate pieces, setting some sort of familiar shape into which each fits. The Singing Hills Cycle, so far, has not seemed to embody the former to me. I think one could read each entry in any order and there would, mostly, be no loss of coherence. Cleric Chih as a person seems to be relatively static, and while Almost Brilliant does disappear to have a baby, her character seems mostly unaffected by the development, and the chick isn't mentioned at all in this entry, a brief diversion from the usual run of things. Up until the end of the fourth book, I would have gladly said that it fit the second pattern though, with the different structure of each one being the unifying feature of the series as a whole. But at this point, I am forced to admit that that seems to have faded away. These last two books have simply been "the further adventures of Chih and Almost Brilliant". Which is great, as far as it goes, but is missing something that made this series truly special. To go for a slightly fanciful description, the books feel like beads on a string, rather than a necklace.
Had they been this way from the start, had that expectation never been set, possibly things might have been different. Maybe the unifying feature would simply be these two characters, and its episodic nature and lack of progression would have been easy to accept and enjoy. But this is a series that did that. Each book must contend with what has come before. And in the light of that... A Mouthful of Dust doesn't quite shine.
Which doesn't mean this is a bad book. I still enjoyed it. I will, most likely, still read any more in this series that Vo puts out. But I am starting to wonder where it's going. Where will it end? What could a good ending look like, for a series that looks like this? What could make it satisfying, as a wider project? Clearly, there was an answer to that two books ago. It is only in its absence that I begin to question.
And so - a good book. A good story. One that I think I would have enjoyed very much had I encountered it disconnected from the series as a whole. But since I cannot experience that, since I cannot detach it from my awareness of its context, it suffers somewhat under the burden of that comparison.
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The Math
Highlights: continued excellent descriptions of food, genuinely unsettling atmosphere, subtle and well-crafted worldbuilding
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10
Reference: Nghi Vo, A Mouthful of Dust, [Tordotcom 2025]
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
