Rating: 4 stars
Nowhere Bingo 26: Novella
Dark Corner Selection: January 2026
Chih is a young cleric from the Singing Hills monastery who travels around the country searching for stories and history. At the shores of Lake Scarlet, Chih finds the abandoned dwelling where the former Empress In-Yo (the titular Empress of Salt and Fortune) spent her many years in exile. Chih encounters the elderly Rabbit, one of the Empress's former handmaidens, who tells Chih stories of her own past and how it intertwined with that of the Empress.
Rabbit came to court, sold by her parents to cover up a shortfall of five baskets of dye, and while she was there, she met and became loyal to In-Yo, who came to the court from the North, uncultured and savage by the measures of the capital. Once she performed her wifely duties and had birthed the Emperor a son, she was forcefully sterilised and exiled to Lake Scarlet, where it was hoped she would die in obscurity. Rabbit accompanied her mistress, and while Chih is cataloguing the various items left behind in the house, Rabbit tells them how In-Yo slowly and meticulously, despite very few resources or allies to her name, plots her revenge and patiently, over the course of many years, plots her way back to power.
This was our January selection for the Dark Corner, my IRL book club. We usually meet on the last Wednesday of every month, but since that means that our December meeting would fall right between Christmas and New Year's, when most people are busy with family and holidays, we always do the meeting for that book in early January. As a consequence, we try to read a short book, or a novella as our January book, so everyone has time to read it before the second meeting, at the end of January. Nghi Vo has so far published six novellas about the cleric Chih from the Singing Hills, (with a seventh coming out later in 2026), many of which have won awards. The Empress of Salt and Fortune won the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novella in 2021, so it felt like a good choice. I keep picking them up in e-book sales, but this is my first time reading one, or anything from the author (despite owning six different things she's written).
It feels as if the reader is deliberately kept at a remove from the story, since we read about Chih, being told the story by Rabbit, about several other people, of whom In-Yo is clearly the most important. It made it a bit difficult for me to engage with the story at first, because it's always a bit stange being two steps away from the main action, so to speak. The Empire that Chih, Rabbit and In-Yo inhabit is clearly modelled on ancient China, and there are clearly folklore and cultural references that I'm not sure I entirely grasped, but once I stuck with the story, I became very invested in the lives of Rabbit and In-Yo and hoped they would succeed in their rebellion against the Emperor.
I liked this story enough that I will absolutely be reading more, although probably not in the next few months. I also own two of Vo's novels, that are supposed to be good, but one is a Great Gatsby retelling, so that one might not be entirely to my tastes.
Judging a book by its cover: All the novellas in the series have this style of cover art, with rather rough drawings of animals and mythological beasts on the top, seemingly charging towards the bottom of the image, where the background is dark. I find this image rather sinister, and would worry more about the Rabbit, if it too didn't look rather unsavoury.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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