Vixen

by Hoa Pham

"there are many myths and stories about fox fairies. But the only ones I tell are mine.
I was born in the heart of a mountain, dwelling on my own, surrounded by rocks that reached the sky... At first life at the Emperor's court was like the stories they sang, of the moon and the stars disguising sordid sex. Then I was forced to leave. I travelled down the spin of Vietnam from Hue to Saigon, seeing Monks and peasants, merchants and teachers, theFrench and the Cummunists"

Civil unrest forces the Fox Fairy to flee from Vietnam to the land of "the new gold Mountain"- Australia. She is a spirit able to take the form of a woman or a fox at will. Vixen is her story- from the Imperial Citadel and Country Vietnam to Melbourne suburbs and Ballarat bush where spirits are everywhere.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Speculative Fiction

255 pages, soft cover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Aliette · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fox fairy moves through Vietnamese history, from the Imperial Court in Hue to Saigon before the fall, to Australia and its suburbs of Vietnamese immigrants. A wonderful and heartbreaking tale of a woman trying to find her place in a world changing fast.

[Nguyen Lan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Am very thankful for the existence of an accessible English book that explores traditional Vietnamese mythology, adding to a very short list of books that do so. Whilst the imagery was beautifully constructed, beyond that, I felt that the central plot line of an attempt at “finding peace” in the story made for a less scintillating and more meandering read.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vietnamese-Australian author Hoa Pham has been producing a series of highly original novels that convey the immigrant experience through the lenses of fantasy and magic realism.

Vixen is the story of a Vietnamese spirit, a fox fairy who can take the shape of a human woman. At the start of her story, she is a courtesan in the Imperial court in Hue, during the rise of the Viet Minh and the intervention of the French colonialists. Her spirit luck allows her to rise in the court to become a trusted advisor to the Emperor; she also falls in love with one of the Imperial guards.

This idyll cannot last and she is expelled from the court just as the Empire starts to wane. Her survival threatened in a land where worship of spirits is on the wane, she ends up fleeing to Australia. There she encounters an even stranger country, and spirits of an altogether different kind. In both human and fox form, she finds herself struggling in alien surrounds.

I'm an unabashed fan of Pham's writing; I find her stories fascinating and will happily read anything that she writes. This one is another winner for me.

[Glaiza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the best historical fantasy I've read yet.

Note on mythology: The author's note mentioned that Indigenous Australian mythology appears in this story and that they tried to be sensitive in incorporating this element. [The ningaui briefly appears to the fox spirit during the gold rush era chapter.] Though I don't know if an Aboriginal reader was consulted about this element during the writing process, and I hope they were but if not, take note that Indigenous perspective should always come first.

[Ilyhana Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel may be fantasy or reality, according to the reader's cultural belief.
It is such a different piece of work that it is hard to name its genre.
It offers readers a journey into some place else entirely.
The structure is very loose, almost too loose so that it sometimes loses cohesion. At times it's difficult to know what's happening.
There are also places where it is obvious that editing was absent and the text is still in draft form! Oh dear!
However, I liked this author's work very much. I would just like to see some development of flow in the work, without it stifling the originality of the content.