"The Samurai and the Seven Fox Spirits" by Valerie Fliss

(If the image is a bit wonky, that's my fault; the Internet doesn't have any pictures of this book's cover, so I had to make one myself by scanning in a physical copy of the book. At least it's better than the one for The Prince and His Ants, though!)

Well, that was pretty much exactly what I was expecting. It's about, *drumroll please*, a samurai. Also, seven fox spirits. It reads like an old folktale, which I'm pretty sure it was meant to.

Basically, a samurai wanders into a town that's been plagued by mysterious disappearances and other strange stuff. A small child convinces him to figure out what's going on, which he does, although it involves climbing a nearby mountain and having a fight with an oni (who |killed the former mountain goddess to become a mountain god himself|.)

(Warning: spoiler-tagged musing ahead, which does contain some ending spoilers.) I kind of liked how |not everything went back to normal at the end. The former mountain goddess is still dead, and the samurai has to take her place to prevent the oni from respawning over and over|.

 

(This post has a lot of parentheses.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence and some bits of creepy Japanese folklore (water sprites that try to drown you, odd ghost things, et cetera).

And, as you probably guessed, 4 stars.

(Endnote: There's another one of these, The Tower in the Forest, but I picked only this one up and not the other one because... the other one didn't appeal to me, honestly.)