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Nghi Vo's debut novella, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, is an Asian-inspired secondary world fantasy. It opens with a young cleric, accompanied by a talking bird, travelling to the lake where the recently-deceased empress of their land was exiled fifty years ago. Arriving there, they meet an old woman who was a servant during the empress's exile, and the novella weaves together the present-day narrative of the cleric's meticulous cataloguing of the contents of the house where the empress lived, attempting to piece together the history of the period, and the old woman's story of her life in exile with the empress.
I don't want to say too much about the book, because I loved the way the intersections of the two narratives slowly revealed the shape of a different story, and I think knowing anything about what that story would be would have lessened the joy of watching it. It's beautifully written, with a precision and balance to it, a subtlety and delicacy and a careful, evocative use of language to tell an epic story in barely a hundred pages. I thought it was delightful, and am looking forward to reading the next in the series (and also to Vo's forthcoming novel, which is a queer Asian-American reimagining of The Great Gatsby, and really, how could you not want to read that?).
I don't want to say too much about the book, because I loved the way the intersections of the two narratives slowly revealed the shape of a different story, and I think knowing anything about what that story would be would have lessened the joy of watching it. It's beautifully written, with a precision and balance to it, a subtlety and delicacy and a careful, evocative use of language to tell an epic story in barely a hundred pages. I thought it was delightful, and am looking forward to reading the next in the series (and also to Vo's forthcoming novel, which is a queer Asian-American reimagining of The Great Gatsby, and really, how could you not want to read that?).
