sophia_sol | Entries tagged with author: nghi vo

Today I listened to the audiobook of The Empress of Salt and Fortune, rereading the book for the first time since I read it four years ago. It continues to be a very good book, and it's one that's very well suited to listening to as an audiobook, given the nature of the story it is telling.

But. This is not a review that's intended to convince other people to read the book. (Though you should! it's great!) Rather, I have a burning need to talk about spoilers, with people who have already read the book too and have opinions on some stuff.

Click here for the spoilers

Ok so. There's clearly SOMETHING going on with the identity of Rabbit vs In-yo, right. But I'm not clear on what???? Are Rabbit and In-yo one and the same person? Did Rabbit and In-yo swap places and swap identities, and if so, at what point in their lives? If there are hints that I'm missing here I would LOVE to hear more!

Ok one other note on the book, while I'm here and talking about it, actually.

right I suppose this is spoilers also

I really appreciate that it's a story about monarchy/royalty/empire that makes the ruler compelling in a way that gets you on her side while also being unflinchingly real about the death and destruction that inevitably comes from such a ruler and such a person. Impressive! I love it.

But really I want answers to the questions in my first spoiler cut!!

The third novella in the Singing Hills cycle! I absolutely adored the first two, so I was extremely excited for this one. It's a series that is about storytelling, and about the ways in which the teller affects what the story is and what details you get, and I looooooove this.

But having read this latest book, I feel sincerely like I'm missing something. I feel fairly confident the book is doing something that connects the various stories told within the narrative to each other, and I think also with the character Lao Bingyi in particular, in order to say things about the series theme. But I have no idea what! I ended the book feeling a bit obtuse. PLEASE explain it to me if you've read this book!!!!

Anyway without whatever it is that pulls the disparate parts together, the book felt very episodic to me. Lots of lovely details and I enjoyed it on the surface level of "Chih goes on a road trip and hears some nice stories and nearly dies a few times" but on that level it doesn't seem to fit with the other books in the series. It was nice though to get to see more of who Chih is as a person, though! You get to see more of that in this book than the previous ones.

But really. Please explain what I'm missing here! Was I just too sleep deprived when reading it to put some obvious hints together??

HECK YEAH!!! Nghi Vo's novella duology was everything I could have ever wanted they were so perfect, and then her more recent retelling of The Great Gatsby I just felt disappointed by. But Siren Queen has Vo back on her A game!

This book is set in pre-code hollywood, following a young queer Chinese-American woman who falls in love with the movies and will do anything to be a successful actor -- except play the stereotypical Asian roles. The world is full of dangerous magic, on top of the more mundane dangers of being a vulnerable outsider under the control of the power-hungry men who run the studios, but she's determined to find her way.

I love the role of magic in this story, that it feels real and threatening and ever present but also always slippery and a little out of reach of understanding. The reader never really grasps all the rules of magic in this world, but not in the irritating way where it just feels like the author is being sloppy, but instead in a way where it feels numinous and believable, always just around the corner.

I also love the various intertwining lives of the other women in the novel, because of course our protagonist is not the only one around. They each have their own ways of making a way to live in the world, and sometimes those ways are in conflict with our protagonist's, but none of them are necessarily wrong for it. They each just have different priorities. But the protagonist loves women so much, and the book loves women so much, and there are so many great characters! (there are also some great male characters too, for the record; I love the part of the storyline involving Harry particularly!)

The protagonist's relationship with her sister, her sexual and romantic partners, her roommate, the older woman who helps her get access to a studio head for her chance as an actor, on and on. They're all great. But of the women in the protagonist's life, I particularly love Greta; she fascinates me, and I love the strength of the bond between Greta and the protagonist, even though Greta is straight. I love when books depict those kinds of complicated relationships that are beyond the bounds of what's normally considered friendship, but also doesn't follow the expected patterns of a partner-level relationship.

(In case you're wondering why I'm writing around the protagonist's name: yes, names are complicated in this book. Love that for a narrative, hate that for me trying to write a review :P)

But overall what I love most about the book is the Vibes. Idk sometimes authors are just good at creating a Vibe with their words and Vo does this!

In conclusion I loved every minute of reading this book and I can't wait for whatever Vo puts out next. (which appears to be another Singing Hills novella due out later this year and I CANNOT WAIT)

The Great Gatsby entered public domain this year, and of course there are immediately people doing things with it, because it is enormously famous. The Chosen and the Beautiful is a retelling of the novel from the character Jordan Baker's perspective, with bonus magic, and also Jordan is bisexual and Vietnamese.

And somehow this book is exactly that. I don't know what I was expecting but.... it fits so tidily into exactly what the premise would imply, and I think I thought that Vo would go somewhere interestingly unexpected with it?

But it is in fact a straightforward retelling of the events of the original, following remarkably close, including all of the expected scenes. Oh, it's definitely a more enjoyable book to me than the original, extremely queer and much more interested in complexities of identity and where people come from. But it is still at its heart a retelling of The Great Gatsby, updated.

The addition of magic and demons doesn't do much for me either tbh. It seems to be added solely to highlight the themes that were/are already present in the story -- and it doesn't strike me that it actually adds much of anything? Those themes were already clearly legible without it!

Idk, I guess my overall issue with the book is that it seems to have been written from a place of love for the original canon. Yes it's criticising the original in some ways, but it comes across to me like criticising a thing you love. And I emphatically do not love The Great Gatsby!

Is this book good at doing the thing it's doing? Absolutely! But it's not quite the thing I hoped it would be doing.

My ranking of the novellas for the Hugo Awards this year! For the books where I wrote a full review, that review is linked from the title.

1. The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo

I adored this book, it's so great!

2. Finna, by Nino Cipri

Thoroughly enjoyable light read.

3. Ring Shout, by P Djeli Clark

An excellent book I really admire, but didn't actually particularly enjoy the reading of.

4. Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi

This was a DNF, unfortunately. I found it confusing and hard to follow, and eventually I was just like, "I am not getting anything from trying and failing to make my brain focus on this" so I gave it up a little over halfway through. But it's clearly doing some interesting and important things, despite the way it's written not working for my brain, so I'm still ranking it above the novellas I actively disliked!

5. No Award

6. Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey

Decent premise but I found it deeply frustrating in the way it totally failed to consider anything it was doing.

7. Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire's writing continues to irritate me. I'm going to do me and everyone who reads my reviews a favour and I am not going to continue to read McGuire even if she shows up on future hugos.

These two novellas stand alone well but also read GREAT back to back, and I loved them both a lot!!

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo

A novella about a cleric who's investigating the history of a now-dead Empress, and finds the Empress's favourite handmaiden to hear stories from her about the Empress's life in exile.

It's a story told in snapshots, a bit at a time, each piece of the story brought out by another object the cleric finds in the house of exile relating to that time. The handmaiden often asks the cleric "Do you understand?" and I'm not convinced I do always understand, myself, but you know, I don't think that matters! A story is created out of the mosaic nonetheless, and you can see the overall shape of what's going on, even if not all the specific things the handmaiden means by it.

It's a story of a foreign woman brought into the empire to be a lesser wife to the Emperor and serve a political need for him, who finds ways nonetheless to build her own power and to keep her own secrets. The reader gets to find out some of these secrets, but the Empress was clearly a woman with depths, and not everything is to be shared. The layers of metanarrative between the Empress and the reader allow her to remain in large part a mystery, but a compelling mystery that you find yourself cheering for.

An unusual book, and a really good one!

When The Tiger Came Down the Mountain, by Nghi Vo

Oh hello, this book might be actually perfect??? Or at least perfect for me! Sequel to The Empress of Salt and Fortune, this is the further adventures of the cleric Chih in travelling around taking down stories for the archives!

Chih is on a journey through the mountains when they and their guide are accosted by three tiger sisters. Chih talks the tigers into letting them stay alive at least a little longer, by promising to tell them a story. It's a story the tigers know too! And they spend the whole time Chih's telling the story explaining exactly how wrong they are.

I love how Chih is eternally inquisitive, just always wanting to know more about everything. I love the dynamics between the three tigers, that they're not a monolith of opinion. I love the guide, who trusts and adores her Very Good Mammoth. I love the story of the romance between Scholar Dieu and the tiger Ho Thi Thao. And I love love love that the entire theme of the book is that the way a story is told is always affected by who is doing the telling and what their priorities are.