The Empress of Salt and Fortune

Pros

• Nghi Vo's first Singing Hills novella is great; it's slowly paced and more emotional, with a great ending. It's called The Empress of Salt and Fortune.
• nghi vo’s the empress of salt and fortune packs a surprising amount of court plotting into a short book.
• I thought it was absolutely beautiful, really confidently written.
• The Empress of Salt and Fortune ... is one of my favourite reads of the last few years. It was a beautiful piece of writing using a "stories within a story" format to pack enough ideas for a full novel into about 120 pages of tightly-wri...
• I love this book so much! For me, it sings because the traditional fantasy plot points (revolution, war, succession) play second fiddle to the characters lives, relationships, and emotions.

Cons

• when I got around to The Empress of Salt and Fortune I was pretty underwhelmed. Both the frame and the central story are much less compelling IMO.
• 9. The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo - 3/5
• I wasn’t a fan of the frame story and it took up a lot of space. I also found some of its feminism problematic... Overall the book didn’t do much for me.
• I felt pretty similarly with this one. It was another of those books which I think suffered from novella format for me-- I sort of just wanted more from it. I was impressed with the writing, and the structure, but same as you, I never re...
• The prose itself is undeniably gorgeous. Flowery, lyrical, evocative - Vo is clearly doing something deliberate and artful. But for me, it tipped into over-embellished often enough that I found myself admiring the writing more than conne...