The Empress of Salt and Fortune feels like a novel trimmed down to a novella. There's a lot crammed in here, and a lot of it is pretty great, but it feels like there are a lot of in-between moments missing to get more than the barest glimpse of what's happening. 

The framing of the story is that an old woman who served the Empress tells a scholar about the Empress's rise to power as the scholar finds items around the residence they stayed at. I think it's an interesting way to tell the story, but a lot of the time it doesn't seem to work very well. The Empress is the most interesting character, at least to me, but we're two degrees of separation away from her. While the "grandmother" is an important character, and the whole point is that her story is as important to record as the mighty Empress, I thought there were long periods where her perspective didn't matter much and it was just an indirect way of telling the Empress's story.

We also have occasionally awkward character development because of the framing. The Empress starts as an abused woman struggling to stay afloat in court politics, but she transitions into someone worthy of her title largely between pages. There's a point partway through where she seems to act more like the Empress, and while I can see events that caused the change it felt like the change itself happened between the snippets we got. 

I think most of my problems have to do with the way the story is told. I think the book captures very well what it wanted to capture, but it failed to capture much beyond that. There's a lot to this story and this world that are present but not really elaborated on in a satisfying way, and I think that killed a lot of my enjoyment of it. I mean, how do you bring up mammoth cavalry and not do anything with it?