The Empress of Salt and Fortune

With the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period drama The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women.
A young royal from the far north is sent south for a political marriage. Alone and sometimes reviled, she has only her servants on her side. This evocative debut chronicles her rise to power through the eyes of her handmaiden, at once feminist high fantasy and a thrilling indictment of monarchy.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Tor.com for an eARC in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. Quotes are taken from an unfinished version and may differ from the final product.

I can’t even tell you what my initial thoughts about this were or why I picked it up, and this … never happens to me?

Okay, okay, I know, likely story, right? But I honestly don’t recall even requesting it. I had forgotten about it completely until I read another review of it and was like … wait. So I scrolled through NetGalley and sure enough! So okay, probably not a rousing endorsement for me and my ability to adult, but my point with this is that this novella is so easily overlooked or relegated to the background, and it totally shouldn’t be. Don’t make my mistakes, folks. I already made them so you won’t have to. You’re welcome.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a beautifully written story within a story that features strong women making the most out of a world that made the mistake of underestimating them.

This was a really short read that took almost no time, and it flowed right along. The writing was gorgeous and vivid, and the characters were interesting enough. The protagonist is agender, and there’s even a F/F romance, so there’s plenty to look forward to character-wise. Oh, and the cunning! I do so love me some cunning characters.

❧ This is essentially a story within a story, where we’re told about the past through the lens of a cleric seeking answers from an old woman in the present.

It was a little jarring at first to try to get into the flow of it, but once I understood what was happening, I thought it was an interesting style. The story is about In-yo, the former empress, but also just as much about Rabbit, who’s telling it. It has the intimate feel of sitting at your grandmother’s feet listening to stories of the glory days … but with higher stakes. I mean, most of our grandmothers didn’t work for empresses, I assume.

While it was an interesting style, this also posed a bit of a problem for me, in that the story and characters felt distant and hard to both relate to and get sucked into.

This may just be a me problem, actually, but I find that I prefer stories where I feel like I can engage with it, where I feel like I’m there experiencing it. That’s definitely not the case here. As a reader, I did feel invited into the sort of fireside chat … but that wasn’t where the real action was. It was in the story of the past that was being told. It was a weird dynamic that didn’t quite work for me, though I’m going to chalk that one up to just personal preference.

❧ The writing style is lovely and flowing, evoking almost a mystical, fairy tale-ish feeling, while still painting each scene vividly.

It’s deceptively simple on the surface and easy to follow, so you don’t even suspect it when you’re slapped in the face with a gorgeous description of the scenery or some poignant quote that just steals your breath. The beauty is almost in this juxtaposition of easy narrative mixed with just stunning phrases.

Despite its brevity, this story still manages to pack in quite a few surprises, too.

I think part of that is definitely down to the story-in-a-story way it was written, because the storyteller only reveals things little by little. I mean, first, the progatonist, Cleric Chih, is agender and uses gender neutral nouns. I was confused at first, but I thought it was really neat (and about darn time). It’s implied that all clerics are such.

The foreshadowing, though, was on point. There were several times where I picked something up and was like … I bet that’s going to mean something later. And it did! I loved being able to spot those things and know that they would have hidden significance, even if I didn’t quite know what it was yet.

❧ Despite never actually getting to “meet” In-yo, the empress, she manages to be an impressive character.

I actually think choosing to tell her story not from her perspective lent a lot to her character, because we’re all different inside than we project to the world, right? I mean, look, here I pretend to be all organized and thoughtful, when inside, it’s just a burning hellscape fueled by the soundtrack of random screams.

Because Rabbit sees In-yo in a certain light, we also get to meet her in that way, and I enjoyed the dynamic. There’s a lot unsaid in this novella, where you really have to read between the lines and listen to what’s being implied, and I absolutely loved it. I got a good feel for In-yo and the way she refused to be beaten down by circumstance. The only bad thing about it is that I wanted more of her, since this was, in theory, supposed to be part her story, and it didn’t feel like her story was over.

❧ At its heart, this is a story about strategy: being dealt a hand you can’t control and choosing to win despite everything.

And wow did I absolutely love this aspect of the story! I think the blurb doesn’t quite do it justice. This is a story of strong women, told by a strong woman. It’s a story of cunning and survival and underhandedness, and … yes. Yes, yes, yes. These women, by all rights, could have, maybe even should have, given up in the face of the path they’ve been forced on, and yet they don’t. Instead, they kick butt, in a quite, more underhanded way, and I absolutely loved it.

❧ As much as I want to love this world, I’m sort of really confused about it.

This may just be a side effect of it being a novella, because at some point, you have to cut something for the sake of length, right? In this case, I feel like it was the world-building.

There are hints of all sorts of bigger things in the world: of the mystical and paranormal, of politics and war, of historians and fortune-tellers.

It sounds exciting, right? Unfortunately, I didn’t actually get a real sense of these things and where they fit in the larger world. I didn’t even get much of a sense of the larger world, except that there obviously was one and some hints at different kingdoms, etc. The story has a very obvious Asian influence, but it pretty much all takes place in one setting, and I wish there had just been more anchoring in the world itself.

❧ I love the idea of novellas, but I’m finding more and more that they just don’t quite work for me.

This is obviously a me problem and nothing to do with this story, but it just didn’t feel to me like a fully fleshed-out idea. It felt like a brief glimpse at something that could’ve been really interesting, but didn’t quite reach fruition. The ending was brilliant to wrap up Rabbit’s story, but I felt like nothing else was resolved and there was just too much stuff left over for me to feel satisfied. Either I’m reading the wrong novellas for my taste or I just need something longer, because it seems like I’m always walking away with a bit of a bitter taste of not really feeling satisfied.

If you were an empress (or emperor) what would you want your associations to be? I would obviously be Empress of Knives and Fire.