My Review: This review is a bit early, as it won’t be out for another couple of weeks. But that’s fitting as this story takes place early in Cleric Chih’s career. Not just before the events of The Empress of Salt and Fortune, but before Chih became the more-or-less, usually, mostly, polished and above all experienced Cleric readers of the series have come to know and love.

My Review: Cleric Chih’s Singing Hills Abbey is not precisely an archive of history. Not that it isn’t an archive, and not that it doesn’t preserve history. But it’s not a historical archive in the sense that we think of one. It’s not a place that stores original documents in an attempt to record history without bias or interpretation. The Singing Hills Abbey, and its collection, exists at the intersection of “we make gods in our own image” and “fiction is the lie that tells the truth”.