The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

This is “the story under the story,” once shrouded and entombed now working itself free, as if slowly rising out of the ruins of a collapsed house after an earthquake, and carving a space where it can beat again.

In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Vo turns her attention to the kinds of characters and conflicts that are too often find sidelined in such stories-and she does it to unforgettable effect. I have never felt more reluctant to turn the last page, needing to stay in this place where I could believe in magic and story keepers and memories that extend backward through time’s infinite doorways.Īt only a little over 100 pages, this is a slender story, and yet, remarkably, Nghi Vo carries a great deal with her in its pages: beauty, horror, wonder, and a searing paean to the power of story.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a gorgeous book, a graceful and incandescent story like no other. They built a sustainable catalog of half-lies, altering truths to appease the living, but Rabbit’s “allegiance lies with the dead, and no matter what the clerics say, the dead care for very little.” The world had cycled through endless permutations of In-Yo’s story. But In-Yo had been called to greater things, and if she had once carried within her some part of her that was capable of singing and nurturing and loving, it was culled down to animate what was left: the rage and vengeance and awfulness. In-Yo, as the tale goes (or, at least, as Rabbit tells it) was brought to court for a marriage of alliance and expected to curl into her good-wife place like a loyal hound at her master’s feet. On the road, Chih meets an elderly woman named Rabbit and she tells them of the story of the exiled Empress In-Yo, whom Rabbit served loyally as a handmaiden. But Chih, a cleric from Singing Hills traveling in search of stories, is here to disturb them. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, dust lays in thick motes on the history of Lake Scarlet, a soft blanket of years draped over old truths and forgotten secrets.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo