You never know what you’re going to get with a trickster. They can be cruel. They are always disruptive. Sometimes, they’re hilarious. If she hadn’t been so desperate to find a way out of the temple where all godsblooded are kept (for their own safety), Nesi would never have approached Fox. She’s auditioned for ninety-six other deities and been rejected by all of them. Very few people have ever auditioned for Fox, however, so Nesi has no idea what to expect. Martin Cahill’s novella, Audition for the Fox, is packed with chaos and pranks and occasional brutality. Most of all, however, it is about hope in the darkest of times.
Nesi has prepared for so many auditions before she approaches Fox. She’s learned to meditate for Turtle. She did her best to eat Leviathan amounts of raw seafood for Whale. Not even her great-grandfather, Bison, accepted her. There was no way Nesi could prepare for Fox’s test: being launched three hundred years into the past, to one of the worst times in her country’s history. Without so much as a hint of explanation, Nesi finds herself in chains, being marched into the mountains to work for her country’s greatest enemy, the followers of Wolf, a deity so monstrous it was kicked out of the pantheon millennia ago. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Fox didn’t even bother to tell Nesi what she was supposed to accomplish in order to pass the audition.
Most of the novella focuses on Nesi as she tries to survive the invaders and works out—with the barest of hints from Fox—what on earth she’s supposed to do three hundred years before she’s even born. What on earth can she do to impress Fox? Is this all a dream? Or might this be real history that she’s caught up in? How on earth can she change anything when she’s weak, hungry, in pain, and the baddies are all heavily armed?
Though Nesi’s situation is absolutely dire, I hoped for her that Fox would turn out to be the kind of trickster that brings good changes, that punches up instead of down, and who has a plan however chaotic it might be. I won’t ruin the story for you. You’ll need to read Nesi’s tale and the interstitial sections about Fox and the other Pillars of Heaven to find out if Audition for the Fox has a happy or a tragic ending. This book will definitely reward readers who are here for both kinds of tales.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley and Edelweiss, for review consideration.