Writers spend a lot of time alone. If we’re lucky, we like being alone, and if we are even luckier, we have people who love us through it all. As I write this, I can’t even tell how lucky I feel.
Acknowledgements, page 120, The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo
Table of Contents
Preamble
This is yet another book that has been in my to-be-read pile for years. Like the others in that category, I don’t remember when I first heard about it, though I vaguely recalling hearing about Nghi Vo’s books multiple times over the last few years. This is my first time reading her work.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune is part of the The Singing Hills Cycle series of novellas, more specifically this book is the first novella released in the series. According to the author’s Wikipedia page, the novellas can be read in any order.
Like with the last few books I have read, I read a library borrowed copy of the book. I have found that I am enjoying novellas a lot nowadays. They make for easy weekend reads and they provide a much needed change of pace from the longer novels I usually read. In this case, after reading Against the Loveless World, I definitely needed a lighter read as a palate cleanser.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
The book has two separate timelines present in it, the “present” which is the main character Rabbit telling her story to the cleric Chih and his magical bird, Almost Brilliant and the past which are the stories Rabbit tells of her youth serving the empress In-Yo. I like this narrative style, there is this cloudiness that comes with memory that serves to give the narrative a mythological sheen.
The story Rabbit tells is one of emperors, lost wars, courtly intrigue and forgotten empresses banished to a remote corner of the realm. It is also a classic tale of an angry women slowly plotting and scheming to get revenge and what she desires. I enjoyed the larger plot beats of the story but I also found myself losing interest in the minutiae of In-Yo and Rabbit’s life.
The fantasy world present seems intriguing but there’s not enough here to write home about. We get hints of ghosts, red lakes, and mage created summers and that’s about it. I suppose this is one of the disadvantages of novella length fantasy books – just not enough space for more in-depth worldbuilding. I suppose I’ll have to read the other novellas in this series to get more of this world.
Conclusions
As far as palate cleansers go this got the job done – it was short and sweet and I read it one sitting. This is a series I am open to exploring more of and I am also interested in reading more of Nghi Vo’s novel length books.
I am also looking for more suggestions for similar fantasy novellas from other authors, I currently do not have any others in my to-be-read pile and I’d love to continue reading these in between longer novels.
That’s all from me this time around, see y’all next time.
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