Love doesn’t conquer all, but it can certainly help

Blurbed as “a powerful f/f romantic fantasy that reads like The Goblin Emperor meets Howl’s Moving Castle in a pre-colonial Vietnamese-esque world”, Fireheart Tiger sees a soft-lesbian princess managing diplomatic negotiations with a potential coloniser for her empress mother. But her first-love, a sword-lesbian princess, is sat across the table; and what about that fire in the old palace?

This is a delightful queer court drama short from one of my favourite authors, set with tea, buns, love and magic. And on the subject of tea and buns (and gỏi cướn summer rolls), de Bodard blogged recipes for Tor.com as a part of promoting this book.

This is another of the books that I had pre-ordered and kicked off this queer reading spree. Something I particularly liked, when I realised after reading, is that there is literally only 1 male character in the book — a court eunuch. We definitely need more queer lit that would fail the first step in some MRA’s reverse Bechdel test.

CN: abusive relationships, implied attempt at rape, colonialism.