Review of Ninetails by Sally Wen Mao

*Nine Tails* by Sally Wen Mao (2024). Published by Penguin Books.

For those of you who have never set foot virtually into this space, welcome! This is my blog, which serves as an online diary and digital archive of everything I’ve watched, read, and experienced in the past few years. Recently, it has become a source of income for me, and a crux as I faced unexpected unemployment after an opportunity I was told I had fell through. Feel free to click around if you liked this post.

In addition to this become a vital income source while I’m unemployed, I’ve been actually catching up on my content game. There are so many movies, television shows, and books I’ve watched and read throughout the years but never had the chance to review, so while I’ve had the free time, I’m dedicating more time to catching up on these reviews.

In this review, I’m chatting about a book that I was waiting for to come out for a while: Ninetails! Sally Wen Mao has been one of my favorite poets for a while. In college I read her poems about Anna May Wong and fell in love, and then I’ve been such a fan of her work.

When she announced she was coming out with a short story collection, I was so ready. I procrastinated a little too hard reading it though, and didn’t get the chance to pick it up until the fall of 2024. This blog post will come out much later, in early 2025, due to the sheer amount of backlog I’m getting through.

Let’s get to the review before I start rambling too much!

Nine stories blurring fantasy, the supernatural, and reality with nine tail foxes.

This is a short story collection, with nine tales composing the extent of the pages. One of these stories is a longer one that’s split across the book, so sections of it are read in the beginning, then the middle, and finally the end.

The bigger story is about an immigration center in the early 1900s located in San Francisco, as well as the rumors of the nine tailed fox and the women who occupy its halls.

Throughout each of the other eight stories Mao does engage with similar themes as that longer story. In one story, a wealthy man buys a life size sex doll. Told from the perspective of the doll itself, she’s brought into his home, where there are many other sex dolls, and she experiences life from that penthouse and observes the people coming in and out of it (the owner and his assistant).

In another story, there’s a fox describing how she allows herself tenderness only once a year. She eats a ripe fig with yogurt, then has a man go down on her. She wakes up as the daughter of Chinese immigrants living in Brooklyn, and the girl is ultimately pursued by a man who nefarious intentions.

Men and their schemes seem to be a reoccurring throughout each of these stories, which feature largely women protagonists. Almost all feature a nine tailed fox as their protagonist, offering new glimpses into the mythical fox and how it can be seen through the prism of modern life.

There’s a lot of disturbing content for those who can’t read about rape and murder; often this is inflicted against women, which is what sparks the harrowing tale. The story of women’s history is never a good one, and Mao has a trained eye on how she can comment it through the fantasy angle of her hook.

At the same time, you can really tell Mao is a poet from the prose. As someone who has trained as a writer for quite a bit now myself, I can usually notice when poets are trying to write prose.

They tend to use more precise, if not flowery details, and can pinpoint larger metaphors than the average fiction writer. A lot of fiction writers I read are very direct (that’s not to say all of them are this way).

Overall Thoughts

I wanted to like this collection more than I did. Seriously. I liked the premise of the nine tailed fox presiding over each of these stories, and thought the story about Angel Island was the strongest about the bunch. That, to me, was the heart of the short story collection.

The writing itself was also great. However, the one caveat about this collection to me is that it fell a little flat when it came to wanting to keep me reading.

I thought the stories were bleeding into each other a little too much and were becoming not-so-memorable after a while. Even now, as I sit to write this review, there are four stories that stood out the most to me. The others are just kind of there.

And what this means at the end of the day is that I might not be the target audience. Go give this a chance if you’re interested and haven’t had the chance to get the book yet. Taste is so subjective, and what I might not love you could love so much and declare it your favorite book. So give this one a chance if you want to!

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