The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Singing Hills Cycle #1)

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo is a story of epic proportions in a tiny package. This is the first novella in the Singing Hills Cycle.

Cleric Chih and their companion Almost Brilliant are taking a detour on their way to the capital to chronicle the coming eclipse. Land that has been closed off for years, most of the reign of the previous empress, is now open. They want to catalog the place where a young royal spent most of her marriage to the emperor - in exile. 

Chih is surprised to find an old woman at the cabin where the emperor's wife-in-exile lived. While they catalog the home, the old woman Rabbit tells them stories of her life as handmaiden to the emperor's wife. 

This is storytelling at its best. A complete fantasy novel in 120 pages! Vo is a wonderful writer. Buy a copy today.

Vo, Nghi. (2020). The Empress of Salt and Fortune. NY: Tom Doherty Associates Books.

Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World's Most Notorious Jewel Thief

Diamond Doris: The World's Most Notorious Jewel Thief by Doris Payne and Zelda Lockhart is a fun, fast read about a very successful thief.

Doris grew up in West Virginia in a coal mining town. At eight years old, she decided she had to protect her mother from her abusive father. That was also when she decided she would never get married.

Not long after, Doris realized that it was easy to distract the shop person she was talking to, to the point of them losing track of their merchandise. Thus began a seven decade long career that spanned the globe. 

This is a great memoir. Super fun read about a bad ass woman who told a psychologist when asked why she did it, that the jewelers wanted her to take the diamonds to absolve them of thier guilt for selling African diamonds. 

Payne, Doris & Zelda Lockhart. (2019). Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World's Most Notorious Jewel Thief. NY: Amistad. 

The Sentence

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is about a bookstore being haunted by their most annoying customer. But it is so much more than that.

On All Souls Day, Flora dies. Tookie is convinced that since then she has been haunting the bookstore - traveling the same isles that Flora did most days, her bangles gently jingling. The independent bookstore in Minneapolis is based on the author's own store.

Tookie got the job at the bookstore after spending years in prison. Her love of books grew during her incarceration. A former teacher would drop off books when she could. Not she must solve what Flrora wants. 

Beginning in November 2019, the characters live through our changing world - Covid, police shootings, continued prejudice against Black and brown people. Tookie explores what the living owe to the dead in this moving, loving look at one of the strangest years of our lives.

Erdrich is a wonderful writer. She is the only author I can think of whose work somehow already has the prospective to write about event so recent with such care and insight.

Erdrich, Louise. (2021). The Sentence. New York: Harper. 

The Gilda Stories

The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez is a different kind of vampire tale. Written in segments, the first being published in the Village Voice, this tale follows a young Black woman from escaping enslavement through the year 2050.

In the 1950s, outside of New Orleans, Gilda finds a young woman hiding in her cellar. The Girl has escaped and fled from Mississippi. Gilda takes her in, moves her to town to help at her brothel. 

After a few years, when Gilda is ready to move on, she turns the girl - giving her the chance to live until she decides otherwise. All she asks is that the girl use the name Gilda.

The chapters that follow lead Gilda to San Francisco, Boston, New York and more. While telling the story of a gentler vampire archetype, one who gives as she takes, Gilda travel through generations of changes in civil rights.

Gomez is a classic lesbian novel. She explores Blackness, radical ecology, redefinitions of family, and the fluidity of the vampire in human society.

Gomez, Jewelle. (1991). The Gilda Stories. San Francisco: City Light Books.

The Sweetness of Water

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, set at the end of the US Civil War is a tale of hope, heartbreak, friendship and endurance.

The war has ended, Union soldiers are in the South making sure that the formerly enslaved people know that they are free to leave if they wish. Tensions are still high as white land owners face the change, Black workers try to understand their options, and town folks adjust to a new reality.

George Walker and his wife Isabelle live on a property outside of the town of Old Ox, Georgia. Being from a family that moved South from Nantucket, George has never had enslaved workers on their land. They never needed workers as George inherited enough from his father to never have to work. He does enjoy wandering his property.

As George wanders, thinking of the news of his son who when to fight in the war, he comes across two brothers camping in his woods. Prentiss and Landry were born on the neighboring farm. When they were told of their freedom, they left. 

George and Prentiss develop a kind of friendship. Isabelle has taken to Landry - a calm, large man who does not talk much due to an injury (read: beating) when he was younger. 

When George hires Prentiss and Landry to help him start a small peanut farm - paying them the wage he would pay any man - some of the people in town do not agree with his ideas.

Harris has written a beautiful book. It is set in a hard time in US history, but he shows the positives and negatives of people at the time. My dread of reading of the time period were unfounded. Though there are hard parts of the book, he does not dwell on them, but gives his characters room to grow and have hope. Read this book.

Harris, Nathan. (2021). The Sweetness of Water. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Red Hood

Red Hood by Elana K Arnold is a retelling of Little Red Ridinghood. In this version, the wolves are the ones in danger.

Bisou lives with her grandmother in the woods near Seattle. She has lived there since her grandmother came and got her in Canada after her mother was killed.

As Bisou is walking home after a school dance, a wolf attacks her. It is the biggest wolf she has ever heard of. But it does not harm her. She manages to evade and then kill the wolf. 

When her grandmother figures out what happened, she has a story to tell Bisou. One about boys and how they can become wolves, endangering the young women around them.

Arnold has written a very readable, important book for all teen girls. 

Arnold, Elana. (2021). Red Hood. New York: Balzer and Bray.