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Review: Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo

Empress of Salt and Fortune slaps. I review books and I am very professional and Empress of Salt and Fortune fucking slaps. I could honestly end this post here. You would believe me, right? You would just read The Empress of Salt and Fortune based on that! Plus this gorgeous cover!

Empress of Salt and Fortune

Chih, a cleric from the Singing Hills abbey, has come with their ?familiar? to Thriving Fortune, where they meet an elderly woman with stories to tell about the Empress of Salt and Fortune, who once lived in exile in Thriving Fortune. The elderly woman, Rabbit, offers Chih and their hoopoe, Almost Brilliant, a place to stay. As Chih looks through Rabbit’s home and finds relics of her past, Rabbit tells stories of her life as a servant to the Empress, in the years of the Empress’s exile.

This book slaps. One of the challenges of the novella length is to create a story that feels satisfying; another is to get the reader in on characters when we don’t have much time to spend learning what they’re about. Empress of Salt and Fortune delivers so resoundingly on both fronts. At first, when Rabbit is telling stories to Chih, you aren’t sure what the thrust of them is going to be — Chih says that they’re starting to understand long before you, the reader, start to understand. So it’s immensely satisfying to find that the throwaway details in Rabbit’s stories, the things you thought were there for scene-setting or local color, are absolutely central to what happened to Rabbit and her Empress.

She was a servant in the Empress’s household, not a person of importance, and the Empress herself was important only insofar as her marriage cemented an alliance. Once she had done her duty by bearing a son, there was no further need for her. When you reach this point in the book, you think you understand: Rabbit is telling history from the sidelines, as a marginal commoner in the household of marginal royalty. But the real project of the book is to tell the story of how marginalized people fought their way to the center. The Empress makes use of the tools that come to hand, and mostly those are people who are overlooked, ignored, and discounted.

One drunken evening, many years on, In-yo would say that the war was won by silenced and nameless women, and it would be hard to argue with her.

If you’re a fan of KJ Parker but wish his books weren’t so heartless, Empress of Salt and Fortune is your guy. It’s a novella that packs an emotional wallop, a story of political machinations that centers on servants and salt and games of chance, and easily one of my favorite books of 2020.

Another note: I received this book as an ARC from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.