Mao explores sexism, misogyny, women’s rage, injustices, oppression, and internal lives alongside questions of otherness, belonging, and who gets to tell our stories. I particularly like how complex and layered the women are in the various tales. Their stories, their motivations, and their interiority were rich in nuance.

I also want to highlight the excellent prose. You can tell it was written by a poet. It’s extremely well written: fluid but not excessive. Every word was chosen deliberately and used with precision.

With that said, as it’s a collection of loosely, interconnected stories that utilises foxes as a theme, I felt some stories were stronger than the others in exploring and making better use of the theme.

Overall, I liked reading this and it piqued my interest to check out Mao’s poetry. Here’s to hoping she writes more stories as well as I would be delighted to read more of her work since she set such a high bar with her first book of fiction.