Paperback, 121 pages
English language
Published Aug. 6, 2020 by Tor Books.
With the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period drama, Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women.
A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully.
Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.
At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She's a northern daughter in …
With the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period drama, Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women.
A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully.
Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.
At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She's a northern daughter in a mage-made summer exile, but she will bend history to her will and bring down her enemies, piece by piece.
A beautiful, engrossing, and elegantly written novella.
Chih is a cleric who makes a stop on the way to the coronation of the new empress. Rabbit is an old woman who reminisces about her life serving the former empress.
Some really great world building in not very many pages; the format worked really well for the story being told, but I couldn't help but feel the ending was hedged a bit in favor of over-explaining what had already been pretty clearly laid out in the chapters beforehand (especially for a novella that repeatedly asks "do you understand?" the subtext throughout)
The writing is sooooo good and so flowyyy.
Why didn't I buy part two right along with it? Stupid, stupid, stupid! (Rtc)
Smart, spare, intriguing.
I guess I'm going to have to accept the trend of "novella trilogies", this stands alone but.
Nghi Vo writes a story that’s very much influenced by East Asian tales, where humans have animal names, empresses predict the future—or influence it—with the help of mages, and a religious order has a mission to record History as in happens, or just happened.
I loved this, it was short and sweet, the writing was exquisite and the tale unfolded enchantingly(?), I don't think I grasped everything so it would be a great reread^^
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.
No doubt having just finished a 1200+ page book that at times lulled me to sleep the effect of this incredible novella (read in under a day) was magnified, but I can't think of a better argument for brevity as one of the key skills of a master storyteller, and this applies to both the author as well as the teller within the story. This fantastic novella also has the most incredible emotions-per-page ratio I can remember, I gasped and got teary eyed more times than I expected. Wholeheartedly recommended if you're looking for some short and sweet fantasy!
