The Empress of Salt and Fortune

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo

THE EMPRESS OF SALT AND FORTUNE is as good as all the starred reviews say it is! Which is honestly what I expect from a Tor novella.

I really loved the almost epistolary structure of the book, and the subversion of the ideals of hereditary monarchy (which is a conceit I've never understood--why would you think the child of a great leader would make a second great leader? That's not how children work. And yet it seems people always need to be reminded of the foolishness of dynasties). I'll always be a fan of librarian/archivist characters, and the idea of a flock of birds that functions as a kind of ~cloud storage~ of a nation's history is absolutely perfect. I wish this was a full novel, because I was just starting to connect with the characters and then, bam, the book was over. I'm glad there's a part two in the works.