The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie Liu
- Publisher: Tachyon Publications, June 15th 2021
- Genre: Fantasy
- Format: Paperback (eARC)
- Page Count: 256 pages
- My Rating: ★★★★ (4/5)
Click on the cover for my review on Goodreads.
The Tangleroot Palace contains six short stories (“Sympathy for the Bones,” “The Briar and the Rose,” “Call Her Savage,” “The Last Dignity of Man,” “Where the Heart Lives,” “After the Blood”) and one novella (“Tangleroot Palace”), all of which are fantasy with hints of horror and gorgeously written. At the end of each story, there is also brief commentary by Liu, providing some background and thematic connections between the stories.
I adore the writing, which flowed beautifully, and I love how effortlessly detailed each sentence is. Fantasy short stories are extremely difficult to pull off, given the need to provide enough world building and plot within the limited word count, and Liu delivered not one but six satisfying stories.
The first story, “Sympathy for the Bones,” opens with a funeral and is about hoodoos, setting the tone of the whole book to be both magical and macabre. In “The Briar and the Rose,” we have a sapphic retelling of Sleeping Beauty as suggested by the title, a love story between swordswoman Briar (WOC) and Rose, whose body is possessed by a sorceress. I really enjoyed this one but the climax was glossed over and I felt it could’ve been so much more amazing than it already is.
“Call Her Savage” is set in the Tang Dynasty around the Opium War and Empress Xiao Shen Cheng (Manchu: ᡥᡳᠶᠣᠣᡧᡠᠩᡤᠠ ᠣᠯᡥᠣᠪᠠ ᡧᠠᠩᡤᠠᠨ ᡥᡡᠸᠠᠩᡥᡝᠣ) was also present in one scene. The main imagery of this story revolves around stars, in military star, stars in the sky, the name of the main character Xīng (which is 星, stars, in Chinese yet never explicitly mentioned in the text). This one was a little confusing for me—perhaps I tried too hard to tell history from fiction—with some information being laid out too thickly, but I loved the historical aspect nonetheless. With Xīng (Chinese-Scottish, sapphic) being a superhero, this leads us to the next supervillain story, “The Last Dignity of Man.” Alexander Lutheran (achillean) is a powerful but lonely man who loves the idea of being Lex Luthor. This is definitely the most disturbing story for me due to the gore.
“Where the Heart Lives” stars a non-speaking love interest and follows Lucy’s journey into the forest in an attempt to save a woman taken twenty years prior. Cursed forest and magic are important themes that thread through the rest of the book. “After the Blood” is a story about a pandemic with three characters who are not fully human, one of which is vampirish. In the novella “Tangleroot Palace,” Princess Sally, whose name is Salinda, faces the haunted Tangleroot Forest in search of an escape from the marriage proposal from the Warlord. I liked the atmosphere of the story and how Sally prefers to live a relatively common life, leading her to some adventures that she didn’t anticipate.
With Liu’s beautiful writing as smooth as breathing, The Tangleroot Palace is an engrossing story collection debut (she has several published graphic novels), and I absolutely cannot wait for more of her works.
I received an e-ARC from Tachyon Publications via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Content warnings (in the order of the seven stories):
- death, murder, dismembering, bones, past child abuse, pedophilia, blood
- rape, possessing, hints of slavery, racism, mention of war, blood, death, pregnancy, miscarriage, dismembering
- war, blood, drowning, death, poison, bullets, mention of rape
- gore, blood, bone, hospitalization, mention of death, mention of drunk driving
- kidnapping, mention of death
- blood, cutting, gun, pandemic
- blood, death, arranged marriage
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