Series: The Singing Hills Cycle #1
Author: Nghi Vo
Source/Format: Tor.com eBook club; eBook
More Details: Fantasy
Publisher/Publication Date: Tor.com; May 24, 2020
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Synopsis from Goodreads...
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.
I finally caved and read The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. It’s been sitting on my tablet since I got it when it was one of Tor.com’s eBook club titles. And one night, I read the first sentence and was hooked.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune was an engrossing tale about how the life of a girl from humble beginnings got tangled with that of an empress. It recounted their time in exile and everything that entails. It was a beautiful story. And the majority of it is an embedded narrative, with a character (Rabbit) telling another character (Chih, a cleric, and Almost Brilliant, a neixin) their story.
This is one of my favorite storytelling conventions, and when it’s done well it can have an excellent effect. Each part of the story within the story in The Empress of Salt and Fortune was contained in respective chapters. I really enjoyed the format because of how much space it gave the present characters to interact, while also correlating their conversations—and the clues within the setting—to the history being imparted by Rabbit. The characters were, after all, what helped make the story so interesting. Chih and Almost Brilliant were favorites from the start, and Rabbit’s voice easily stole half the stage. All three propelled the story forward.
The point of The Empress of Salt and Fortune can be summed up by one of its earlier passages:
“Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.”—page 11.
And what a marvelous story it was!
