I read Nghi Vo's The Empress Of Salt and Fortune back in December last year, and it immediately became one of my favourite books of the year.  I'm not sure why I haven't come back to them until now, but seeing the fourth book on the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize shortlist prompted me to pick them back up.

Going in to this second book I couldn't really remember much of the first, but it all came back to me as I started reading. Being a novella this is a very quick read, and unlike a lot of novellas I don't think either of these books end up feeling incomplete at the end. They're exactly as long as they need to be.

It's hard to say for sure, since my memories of the first book are fairly hazy, but I think I liked this even more than The Empress of Salt and Fortune despite it being a little more flawed. Vo's prose is beautiful and the world she's built is fascinating. The central conceit of the series - a cleric travelling around the world collecting stories from people - means that we get "fantasy worldbuilding" without feeling like we're sitting through exposition dumps. These books are, in many ways, entirely an exercise in worldbuilding, but the nature of the way the stories are delivered to us makes them person and meaningful. In this second book we see the stories varying depending on who's telling them, and we get to see how important those variances can become, and that's a real piece of magic. This is less worldbuilding than it is mythbuilding.

Where the first book was very passive and "cosy" this one has teeth. There's real threat from the tigers, and the telling of the stories has stakes and feels urgent. It's a very interesting framing device, and I found myself much more invested than I remember being in Empress.

My only criticism here is around the very brief fight scene. We didn't see any "action" in the first book, being allowed to wallow in Vo's almost dream-like prose. The fight scene breaks that gentleness, and I think it's the weakest writing in an otherwise beautiful book. It fell a little flat for me, and I was grateful that it was brief.

That said, this was a great read and again I think Nghi Vo has made the list of my favourite reads of the year. I'm very much looking forward to getting to book 4 to see why it's been so highly acclaimed.