Foxy Tails by Natalina Reis follows the journey of the shape-shifting fox Húlí and his best friend Ling Ling, an adventure that is kick-started when Húlí tumbles into the life of Xiăo Ying, an enigmantic healr who holds the key to Húlí's mysterious past and his romantic future. As trouble from the emperor's family catches up with Húlí, he finds himself physically and emotionally entangled with the powerful Xiăo Ying, who also begins teaching him to use qi. As the danger escalates so does the romantic tension, and the two of them fall in love while fleeing to the mountains with Ling Ling. As a note, while it's clear that this story is inspired by Xianxia, a chinese fantasy genre with a rich tradition, I'm no expert so I can't comment beyond pointing out the connection.

Unfortunately while I enjoyed the world-building and character dynamics of this story, I found the pacing of the plot unsatisfying. There were two drivers of conflict, the budding love between the main characters and the political mystery around Húlí's heritage, and neither of them reached a climax in the last quarter of the story. The romance subplot was very sweet but it wrapped up around the halfway point of the story, and the political drama was just getting going up by the end. I appreciate what Reis was trying to do here, but I don't think I'll read the next installment. ( )

Huli is a nine-tail, shapeshifting fox who, upon one day, as fate would have it, meets the Healer. The Healer has been on his own ever since he came home to find his entire family of divine healers murdered. When the two’s paths cross, their lives change forever.

I had a really hard time getting into this book, and I’ve kind of narrowed it down to the voice of Huli. I always felt distanced from the story. I also didn’t like how he would describe his friends - instead of saying her name, he’d talk about what Ling Ling was doing by saying, “the female”. It really pulled me out of the story and I didn’t feel their connection as best friends. Something was just missing for me unfortunately.

I really enjoyed the world that Natalina Reis created where Asian mythology and fairy tales interweaved together. It’s also very action packed and kept me reading.

*Thank you Hot Tree Publishing and LibraryThing for a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )

An interesting take on Chinese folklore, but the inconsistent characterizations of the three main characters made it hard to finish. The plot takes a while to get going, and things get muddled because the characters are less than consistent. The main narrator, for example, seems to jump between a helpless abuse survivor trapped by his own trauma and a bullheaded and confident incubus who has no fear of death or injury. Similarly, the main love interest jumps between a man who refuses to engage with the other characters emotionally and a strong and steady companion supporting the others emotionally and physically. It almost feels like the author ran through a number of drastic character changes, then failed to update all of the chapters to the same version. ( )

A fox demon takes refuge with a healer and falls in love when he's normally all about the lust. It turns out that the two men have a strangely intertwined past, and what does that mean for their future? Adventure, found family, romance, all wrapped in a light hearted story that feels like a myth. Cozy fantasy, I guess? Very sweet and enjoyable.

I see the other reviewers found it very slow and that not much was happening, but the pacing was perfect for a late night calming read (I especially liked the city with the calming lavender! Great dreams!) ( )

Foxy Tails is a romance that draws heavily on the very popular danmei genre. The fantasy China setting, the court intrigue, the demon protagonist, cultivation magic, etc, is all familiar stuff to anyone who's had some exposure to the genre before. The plot of this particular story is a little difficult to describe cause there isn't too much going on. Huli is a fox demon who runs into the healer Xiao Ying while fleeing from some demon hunting hounds. The two of them pair up, and along with the warrior Ling Ling go out looking for evidence to help bring justice for Xiao Ying's family, who were slaughtered many years ago.

Story wise the book suffers from the complete absence of any real conflict. Huli and Xiao Ying fall in love with each other pretty much as soon as they see each other, and although the narrator tries to insist that they are both people who keep others at arms length none of this comes out in their behavior. There's some hemming and hawing in the first quarter of the book on Huli's part, who despite being someone we are told has had lots of sex on account of him being a sex demon, feels like a "high school girl" around Xiao Ying and is afraid of seducing him against his will. But that gets resolved pretty fast. The relationship between the three protagonists is generally without complication. There are no real antagonists in the book. The emperor is far away, and while he is mentioned with some regularity he never shows up, and his actions never pose any direct threat to the adventure. On the rare occasion that an enemy does show their face, they are trounced immediately and completely.

There is also not much driving action in the book. There is a lot of looking back, and constant reminders of things that had happened before the story started, but Xiao Ying going off to look for evidence is the only initiative that anyone seems to take. Huli follows because he's love sick and Ying Ying follows because she is for some reason Huli's best friend. Through the course of the story they're told to go here and there, and then they do. The reward for this travel is usually a little more backstory revealed. There are no setbacks.

The end of the book feels therefore like the beginning of the story, as suddenly our heroes are given a job to do, the end. If Huli and Xiao Ying constantly reaffirming their deep and absolute love for each other is satisfying enough to the reader this may be fine, but I found Huli to be too passive a personality to be interesting, and the relationships between everyone to be taken too much for granted, and not really earned within the story.

There are a few superficial issues too. The prolific use of epithets I assume is an artifact of hewing closely to danmei style, but not having read any of it even in translation I can't say for sure. Even if so it was jarring to me every time Ling Ling was "the female warrior" and the other's just got "Fox" or "Healer" as their titles. The other issue that kept itching at me was the use of Chinese throughout the text. "Gao, hao, bu, dui bu qi" etc. keep popping up, all basic 101 words but typically still helpfully translated into English soon after. This is generally ok. While this sort of interjection of words with clear and uncomplicated English equivalents into the text isn't my preference, it's not that big a deal. But the text tries to actually explain itself, saying that when the characters use these words what they are doing is speaking in an ancient tongue forgotten by most people. This raises an unintended question. If bog standard modern Chinese is actually a lost ancient tongue in this world, what language are they speaking when they aren't peppering their talk with random ni shi shei's? If you don't know Chinese you may not be bothered by this but I know enough Chinese to be mildly bothered by this.

There are other small complaints I could make, but ultimately the big issue I had with it was the heroes seem to have been given their journey in the last page of the book. If there had been any sort of conflict, if Huli's poor sense of self worth had resulted in a bad behavior rather than just being a trait the narrator reminded us of with regularlity, if the emperor had scored even a single point against the heroes, if the troupe had experienced a test of their loyalty to each other in any way, I might have gotten invested, but with none of that I found myself largely uninterested in the story as I was reading it and am not compelled to read a volume 2, if it appears. ( )