The Empress of Salt and Fortune

This is a story told through a framing story, bit by bit, so really it is two stories: inner and outer. The inner story I liked quite a bit: both the story itself and the way it's told, which very much requires a framing story, so I like the fact that there is an outer story as well.

Unfortunately I like the framing story itself significantly less. It feels like either too much or too little: the present tense, the dialogue, and the details all make Chih more than a placeholder puppet-figure there to listen and hold the inner story in place. And yet: there's not enough for them to feel like a full character either. I kept grasping for some sort of connection with them and coming up blank.

Regardless, I liked the book overall, and it was certainly worth the read.

Selling points: interesting narrative format; queer representation; a victory from underneath.

Warnings: misogyny (in the culture, not the narrative), monarchy, forced/coerced pregnancy, lack of autonomy.

I gave this a reread before reading the other two books in this series. (In retrospect, I think these books truly are a "could read in any order" series and so this was unnecessary.) I enjoyed this a lot even on the second read. I am a sucker for anything with a frame story as well as stories about telling stories. The narration being little vignettes based on objects found around the house really worked for me.

It was fun to have reread this so close to Neon Yang's Tensorate series, and especially The Ascent to Godhood. There's a lot of parallel vibes between the two in their story framing, the rough plot arc of an overthrown ruler, but especially the way the emotional and personal is foregrounded while so much action happens off page. What I think works especially well in this book is how all of these details play into the fact Chih is an archivist and is as deeply interested in both personal stories and histories. It makes this personal focus make sense narratively and, even if as a reader I wish some of the details of the world were a bit less fuzzy, I understand what kind of tale is being told here.

An interesting story, as told to a travelling monk collecting narratives for an archive at their temple, of a young woman from the North that is 'presented' as a bride to the Emperor of the South. It is there that the storyteller, named Rabbit, gets involved with the foreign empresses who strangely excels in games of chance and strategy.

When the foreign Empress gives birth to an heir, she is summarily exiled to a palace far to the west to live out her days. It is here that the monk later meets Rabbit, now the maid to the Empresses, who tells the monk the story (via objects recorded by the monk) of how the Empresses was part of a scheme for the North to conquer the South. But Rabbit herself would turn out to have an unplanned part in the plot.

Told as a story within a story, the fantasy elements remain mainly in the background but are still important by providing some context to the environment the story is set in. Still an interesting start to a series of stories involving the recording monk.