![]() ![]() A lot has changed in the fantasy genre since I was a little kid whittling weekends away in a public library. This isn’t the first book I’ve read in which that is true. Reading the adult fantasy novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo, however, that mirror melted away. Yet for my entire childhood, the two halves were like me and my reflection in the mirror. In tales of adventurers walking through worlds of breathless wonder, I saw me, or at least who I wanted to be. In the miniseries centered on complicated women-women who placated their husbands in the same breath as they commandeered their sprawling households-I saw my grandmother, my mom, my aunts. I saw half of my world in the first, and the other half in the second. Growing up, there were two forms of media I consumed voraciously: one, period dramas from TVB, the Hong Kong-based television broadcasting company whose productions were ubiquitous in Vietnamese households I knew and two, fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings and His Dark Materials and of course, Harry Potter. “The Empress of Salt and Fortune” by Nghi Vo. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |