Owen Blacker reviewed The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle, #1)
Review of 'The Empress of Salt and Fortune' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
These 2 novellas are the first instalments of [a:Nghi Vo|7058667|Nghi Vo|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1614060645p2/7058667.jpg]’s Singing Hills Cycle, of which Goodreads has another 3 listed as coming later; while she has had several shorts published in magazines, these are her début books, with her first novel [b:The Chosen and the Beautiful|55169019|The Chosen and the Beautiful|Nghi Vo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1620400751l/55169019.SY75.jpg|84447261], published in the US on 1 June 2021.
The gorgeous covers here are by Alyssa Winans, whose work is pretty popular with queer women writing SFF; you’ll see her work appear a few more times below and there’s a great interview with Winans in Clarkesworld recently.
Both of these novellas see non-binary archivist-cleric Chih as our protagonist; they’re travelling around the empire of Ahn to collect and record stories for their monastery. The first of the 2 is Hugo-finalist The Empress of Salt and Fortune, where Chih interviews an exiled empress in …
These 2 novellas are the first instalments of [a:Nghi Vo|7058667|Nghi Vo|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1614060645p2/7058667.jpg]’s Singing Hills Cycle, of which Goodreads has another 3 listed as coming later; while she has had several shorts published in magazines, these are her début books, with her first novel [b:The Chosen and the Beautiful|55169019|The Chosen and the Beautiful|Nghi Vo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1620400751l/55169019.SY75.jpg|84447261], published in the US on 1 June 2021.
The gorgeous covers here are by Alyssa Winans, whose work is pretty popular with queer women writing SFF; you’ll see her work appear a few more times below and there’s a great interview with Winans in Clarkesworld recently.
Both of these novellas see non-binary archivist-cleric Chih as our protagonist; they’re travelling around the empire of Ahn to collect and record stories for their monastery. The first of the 2 is Hugo-finalist The Empress of Salt and Fortune, where Chih interviews an exiled empress in “a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women”. Nghi Vo has published notes about her novella on Goodreads, too.
Bookriot wrote a lovely article about queernorm worlds in May, which blurbed this first instalment thus:
Another novella, this one has nonbinary and sapphic main characters. It follows Rabbit, a handmaiden to an empress who went on to overthrow the empire. The framing device follows a nonbinary archivist who visits the former empress’s former home and interviews elderly Rabbit about the whole story.
CN for Empress: death of a loved one, forced sterilisation, grief, animal death.
