Nghi Vo

Sometimes I like to read in the middle of the night, when the roads outside are quiet and the day's wind has stilled. And this is a middle of the night sort of book.

It's the fifth in a series of fantasy novellas that can be read in just about any order (but don't start with the 4th) and follows Cleric Chih as they go around their world collecting stories and running into trouble, sometimes the other way 'round.

Each volume is a very different kind of story from the others, some adventurous show more and some melancholy. This one is gothic and creepy. By the end, especially if you read it in the gloom of night, you might be looking for monsters in the corners and the rafters.

I love everything Nghi Vo writes but these novellas are particular favorites and this one is no exception. The details are lush, the worldbuilding exquisite in such a tight space, and the voice of Chih, as ever, comforts and intrigues at once. Perfect little morsels, each and every one, delicious. Read them! show less

Series Info/Source: This is the fourth book in The Singing Hills Cycle. I got a copy of this on ebook through NetGalley to review.

Thoughts: This book was just as wonderful as all of the previous Singing Hills Cycle books. I love that we got to journey to Chih's home of Singing Hills Abbey in this volume. This was a fascinating and heartfelt read with a lot of humor and some wonderful stories within the main story.

This book finds Chih returning to their home abbey only to find that their show more mentor, Cleric Thien has died. As Chih works through their anguish they end up working with Almost Brilliant to help Myraid Virtues (Cleric Thien's hoopoe) navigate her grief. Things are complicated by the gates literally being stormed by mammoths as the Coh clan demands Thien's body for burial.

I continue to love this series' focus on the importance of stories and the legacy stories leave for the rest of humanity. Chih finds some healing in going through Cleric Thien writings and helping to decide which stories will be kept in the archives and which will be kept eternally in the hoopoe's minds. The hoopoes' unique ability to remember things forever across generations is fascinating and is really explored a lot in this book. This book also looks at how different the impact a person has is to different people; Cleric Thien obviously had a huge impact on the Abbey but he also had a huge impact on the Coh clan, but in a different way.

It was a lot of fun to hear about Chih and the trouble they got into growing up at the Abbey. This gave Chih even more history and depth for the reader and getting to know some of Chih's friends at Singing Hills Abbey was a lot of fun too. There are heavy themes of change in this book as well. With Almost Brilliant having her brood and the abbey leadership moving on, everyone is dealing with both the grief and hope that change can bring.

As with all of these books, this was amazingly well written and the story was very thoughtfully woven. This is entertaining while being thought-provoking. I am always in awe at how much I enjoy these books and how much I think about them afterwards.

My Summary (5/5): Overall this was an amazing continuation of the Singing Hills Cycle. I believe (and hope) there is one more book planned for this series and I eagerly await it. I would recommend this series to everyone, but especially to those who enjoy stories about the importance of stories. show less

A really lovely novella. Nghi Vo's Empress of Salt and Fortune takes place in a land inspired by imperial China, where the wandering historian-cleric Chih and their talking bird, Almost Brilliant, hear tales from the elderly Rabbit about her time in the service of the exiled Empress In-Yo. Chih's vocation is to listen and observe and eventually, hopefully, to understand. This is a story about history, and power, and the innate, unshakeable injustice of monarchy and empire.

What I really show more appreciated about Vo's writing was the skill and grace with which she sketched the history and political circumstances of the book's world. Many writers would either struggle to make something like this feel anything other than modern people playing dress up in historical costume, or would go too far in the other direction and start flinging around names and places in the belief that detail is the same as complexity. Instead, Empress of Salt and Fortune feels like a convincing part of a larger world—that Chih will continue on from here tell the story of Rabbit and the Empress to others. show less

You know that analogy that's sometimes used to explain gravity and space-time and such: dropping a ball onto a rubber sheet to see how it distorts things? I thought of it while reading Siren Queen.

Nghi Vo's novel takes place in a fantastical version of 1930s Hollywood, where the studio system is as abusive and controlling as it actually was historically, but ghosts walk, actors aspire to literally become stars, and studio bosses double as inhuman leaders of the Wild Hunt. It's a world show more different enough from our own that you'd expect the presence of all that magic to be like the ball on a rubber sheet, changing things, making it different from "our" world in a way that's more than aesthetic, but I didn't find that here. I don't need to know all the ins and outs of how the magic system works in Siren Queen, but I needed to feel like it had heft to it—like it shaped the world around it.

That, coupled with an emotionally flat/detached POV character and no real narrative direction, meant that I struggled to get invested at all in the book. I liked some of the visuals, I respect Vo's commitment to queer narratives, but I felt like she was trying so hard to convey theme (Queer Monstrosity, capitalisation intentional) that she forgot about telling a story. show less