The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

While on the one hand, it’s a clever way to frame a compelling tale on the other, I found the approach left huge swaths of telling punctuated by brief glimpses of showing.įrom Rabbit’s recollections, it follows In-Yo’s story as a foreign hostage bride to the emperor of a lushly built second world Vietnam. There, they meet Rabbit, who tells first person accounts about various items they uncover. With their talking bird, they visit the newly opened Scarlett Lake, where the empress lived in exile during her youth. The non-binary cleric Chih, whose order has ingrained them with a fidelity to history, has grown up enamored by the myths surrounding the empress. I found the framing of the story both a strength and weakness. It’s the distilling of facts from “His Story,” or in the case of the recently deceased titular character, “Her Story.” Whereas national canon is a glorious past written by a victor, the dirty details of Empress In-Yo’s rise are revealed by Rabbit- the Empress’ onetime handmaiden and perhaps lover-in this mixed story of third person present and first person past. And history-Napoleon’s fable that we all agree on-is the crux of The Empress of Salt and Fortune. When the Goodreads group Books and Boba chose it for its August read, I jumped in.Īll the characters are human, save for a magical talking bird who records history. While its blurb “Handmaiden’s Tale meets Game of Thrones” intrigued me, the animals on the cover and a character named Rabbit led me to believe it was an anthropomorphic story. With a title reminiscent of a Chinese restaurant catering to American tastes, Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune had been buried deep in my Mount TBR since its release in March. NOT “ Handmaid’s Tale meets Game of Thrones” Two hours later, I was done, and was smacking my head at having missed the subtlety. Then, I re-read it, knowing how it ended. Note: Upon finishing this novella, which took six days the first time around, I immediately wrote an initial review where I rated it 6/10 stars.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo