The weirdest thing about writing this post was looking back at my reading spreadsheet for this year and going “Wait, that was this year?” In some cases, I was so sure I’d read the book in a prior year that I went and checked its publication date online to see if I was losing my mind. Result: I was! The feeling that 2021 passed by in a morbid, exhausting flash and also lasted for two thousand and twenty-one years would be notable were it not for the fact that all of the past few years have felt that way. At…
1 CommentTag: The Chosen and the Beautiful
tldr: Wow. When Nghi Vo released her first novella, Empress of Salt and Fortune, I was blown away by her talent at the task category “putting a book together.” I know that’s a very unsexy way to describe a novella, but it applies! Empress packed so much plot, emotional insight, and character development into its 128 pages that it felt like an apotheosis of the novella form. (My use here of apotheosis will be but the first of many hyperbolic shrieks throughout this review, because I’m about as bullish on Nghi Vo’s writing as I have been about any author…
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