Navigating Fox

Whew, the ending felt so sudden I think I hurt something.

The Navigating Fox is like a thousand-page fantasy epic crammed into 150 pages. It's super well written, and the setting is great and I want more, particularly the Northern Membership - although I could stand to go a few days without reading the word "knowledgeable". Now give me the thousand-page edition. 😀

#SFFBookClub

The Navigating Fox is a novella that feels like a piece of a larger novel that's been extracted, loose threads and all. Or, maybe it's just uninterested in filling in all the details and giving explicit answers. I wish this story had been a novel to give it space to stretch its wings.

The best part of this book is all of the worldbuilding details. I love the idea of animals that have been given voices and are now knowledgeable (and self-conscious). I love the various societies and their interactions with an overseas empire that has started extending into the land of this novella. I loved the ideas of how a society that treats animals as people would need to operate. There's just so much going on here in the margins of this book over a core parallel telling of two journeys.

One thing my partner always says about writing is that he doesn't need every detail spelled out, but he has to believe that the author knows these things. This is all to say that this not a book to read for a strong sense of closure, even if you can read between some lines. It feels coherent overall to me, but with a lot more loose threads than I had expected going in.

#SFFBookClub