The Singing Hills Cycle continues with book 5 in the series, and aside from a brief wobble with the third installment (*Into The Riverlands*) these books have consistently been my favourite reads of the past year. They also seem to get better with each new book, which is incredible. After finishing *Mammoths At The Gates* I didn't think there was any way for Vo to top it, and thought that I would have been happy for the series to end there. How wrong I was.

This book is like a magic trick, and it's hard to talk about exactly what's so great about it without spoiling things. Vo tricks us into believing things about the story that aren't true, in the same way that Chih is tricked. When things finally begin to become clear for Chih I also had a moment of clarity about what was going on. I found myself turning back to the first chapter to remember where the story had began, and it was in doing that that I realised there were fundamental truths about the story I was reading that had changed over the course of the telling of it, so subtly that I hadn't noticed.

The only weakness of this series for me so far has been in Vo's action scenes, and it seems that she's put some work in there. There are a couple of moments of violence in this installment but, unlike in the earlier books, the quality of the writing never falters for a second. Vo leans heavily into the dark and the gothic and there are moments of real horror here. Tonally this is as far removed from *The Empress of Salt and Fortune* as it's possible to get, and I continue to be amazed that Vo manages to play in so many different genre pools while still having these stories feel like a cohesive whole.

This is fantastic, and I can't wait to see what comes next.