Audition for the Fox by Martin Cahill Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, folklore, historical fantasy, mythology, retellings
Pages: 192
Published by Tachyon Publications on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads
In this stellar debut fantasy, a trickster Fox god challenges an underachieving acolyte to save herself by saving her own ancestors. But are Nesi and her new friends from the past prepared to defeat the ferocious Wolfhounds of Zemin?
“If you love my worlds, you’re going to love Cahill’s: stunning imagination, daring premises, and deep character dives. A new author to watch.”—N. K. Jemisin, author of the Broken Earth series
[STARRED REVIEW] “A marvelous and heartbreaking tale.”—Library Journal
Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. As a child with godly blood in her, if she cannot earn a divine chaperone, she will never be allowed to leave her temple home. But with ninety-six failed auditions and few options left, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks.
In folk tales, the Fox is a lovable prankster. But despite their humor and charm, T’sidaan, and their audition, is no joke. They throw Nesi back in time three hundred years, when her homeland is occupied by the brutal Wolfhounds of Zemin.
Now, Nesi must learn a trickster’s guile to snatch a fortress from the disgraced and exiled 100th Pillar: The Wolf of the Hunt.
My Review:
I’ll admit that from the title I was expecting something a bit like The Fox Wife. Which I kind of got in a roundabout way but not in the way I intended. Nesi is, after all, sorta/kinda negotiating with the trickster god Fox for her own stab at immortality – just as Snow was trying to live in the way that will gain her more power – and immortality – from a slightly different version of the Fox spirit.
And that would have been a marvelous story. But what I got was even better.
Audition for the Fox is a story about history. Not about the history of our world, and from certain perspectives not even directly about the history of Nesi’s world. Rather it’s a story about the forces that MAKE history – along with just a bit of time travel and the Grandfather Paradox thrown in for extra bodies, spice and heartbreak.
Godsblooded (read as magically enhanced) Nesi is pretty close to convinced that she is a failure. She has petitioned ALMOST every single one of the 99 Pillars (read gods) to accept her as their acolyte. Godsblood like her require a patron Pillar otherwise they cannot leave the Temple where the Pillars – and children and grandchildren of the gods like her – are housed. Nesi craves freedom and adventure, and she won’t get either in the Temple.
But her prospects are looking grim. Only three gods left, the Lion of War, the Serpent of Assassination and the Fox of Tricks. She chose the Fox. And he played a trick on her, as the Fox does, and sent her back in time 300 years to the most desperate conflict in her people’s history.
A conflict they will lose, and lose themselves to, unless someone steps up and leads a rebellion against a force that seems unstoppable. A force that is determined not merely to conquer, but to obliterate.
For Nesi, the occupation of her people’s lands by the devotees of the Wolf is settled history. Throwing off the yoke of the Wolf gave her people, the Oranoyans, the steely backbone they needed to become the leaders of the world she grew up in.
But history needs catalysts, and T’sidaan the Fox knows better than most that history must be fought for. That someone must go into the belly of the Wolf and light the spark of the rebellion or the world will not be as it should.
Nesi’s audition is to be that spark. If she fails, she’ll die in the past and so will the world she knew. If she succeeds, it will break her heart.
Escape Rating A+: Audition for the Fox is a marvelous contradiction in terms on a number of levels. It is, absolutely, a fantasy. It’s a fantasy in the same way that Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle is a fantasy, in that it feels like it’s a myth or a fairy tale being retold, but it’s not a retelling but something entirely new.
(It’s also excellent in the same way, so if you like Singing Hills you’ll probably like Audition as well.)
Very much on the author’s sneaky other hand, this is also a time travel story. It’s just that neither Nesi’s present nor the past she’s thrown into are worlds we know. And her time travel is facilitated by a deity. Or she’s drop-kicked into the past by a deity who doesn’t bother to give her a soft landing. Her introduction to the past is rough and it just gets rougher as it goes until she figures out what she’s supposed to do and how SHE can get it done.
From Nesi’s perspective, she’s caught in a predestination paradox. Or it should be. In her past, it’s already happened, therefore she must have done it. But what if she doesn’t figure it out after all, even though she knows she did? It feels like there will be real, and really world-shattering, consequences if she fails. And she could.
This facet of the story definitely speaks to now. While we think of history as being settled, the fact is that ‘accepted’ history doesn’t have to be all that close to ‘what really happened’ and there are always powerful forces determined to erase or re-write that history to further their own agendas. After all, history is written – and rewritten, by the victors.
Howsomever, another big part of this story, is that this is Nesi’s coming of age story. Or at least a coming into herself and her power story. She starts out in someplace, some time and some situation that is literally hell. And she has to put herself through that hell over and over again until she figures out a better way – and not a way that she can completely undertake herself.
She has to learn that she’s there to be the spark, to be the catalyst, and not necessarily to be the hero that gets sung about in the tales afterwards. She’s there to empower, not to be the power herself, and that’s a hard lesson to learn.
But the more she gets involved with the lives of people in the past, the more she has to lose – in both timeframes – to the point where she can’t choose between them. And we feel for her dilemma even as the choice is rightfully taken from her.
This is a story that definitely turned out to be bigger than either its length or the sum of its parts. And this reader wouldn’t mind AT ALL if this turned out to be merely the first of Nesi’s many adventures – or if it merely (for certain large definitions of merely – turned out to be the first of this author’s forays into fiction a bit longer than his previous short stories.
