When Fox Is a Thousand

by Larissa Lai

A lyrical, magical novel, rich with poetry and folklore plus elements of the fairytale. Larissa Lai interweaves three narrative voices and their attendant cultures: an elusive fox spirit growing toward wisdom and her 1000th birthday, the ninth-century Taoist poet/nun Yu Hsuan-Chi (a real person executed in China for murder), and the oddly named Artemis, a young Asian-American woman living in contemporary Vancouver. With beautiful and enchanting prose, and a sure narrative hand, Lai combines Chinese mythology, the sexual politics of medieval Chinea, and modern-day Vancouver to masterfully revise the myth of the Fox (a figure who can inhibit women's bodies in order to cause mischief).