SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie Liu

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie Liu: https://t.co/ofThcwkPUk

Short Review: 7.5 out of 10
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) June 3, 2021

Short Review (cont): A collection of short stories and novelette length fiction from writer Marjorie Liu (Monstress, among many others) is filled with solid stories, with no real stinkers, but nothing stands out as exceptional either. But a solid collection.
2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) June 3, 2021

Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 15, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Tangleroot Palace is a collection of short fiction from fantasy/comics writer Marjorie Liu (featuring yes, the story by that name).  It's only seven stories long, with the stories probably all at the boundary between short story (7500 words) and novelette (17500 words) in length.  Each story comes with a comment by the author about what it was written for and the prompt that inspired it, after the end of course so as not to spoil.  I'd never read Liu outside of comics - her Monstress comic was in the Hugo Packet for a few years in a row and that was pretty enjoyable, so I was interested to try out her short fiction. 

And well, its' a fun collection with a few winning stories, but nothing particularly mindblowing.  A few stories are highly predictable, if done really well, although a few others are surprising in the directions they go.  Several of the stories deal with love and finding it, magical forests, alternate histories, and more, and again, they all do work.  It's not a collection that I think people have to have, but it's a solid collection of Liu's work, and I'll certainly be on the lookout for more going forward.  

More after the jump - since there are only 7 stories, I'll go into each one very quickly: 

The seven stories of this anthology are as follows:
1.  Sympathy for the Bones - A girl who found herself under the tutelage of a woman feared for her power to kill and harm through stitched-up dolls...and finds her soul held hostage by the woman enacts a plan to gain her freedom from this horror filled role.

2.  The Briar and the Rose - A woman hired as a bodyguard, known as the Duelist, works for a famous courtesan....who secretly is a witch who has taken the body of a beautiful princess, who only is able to wake once a week.  But the Duelist has fallen in love with the princess and searches for a way to free her.  

3.  Call Her Savage - In an alternate steampunk history, a China allied with and with territories on America is in danger of being destroyed by a British Empire - an Empire using the magic of found crystal skulls, and only a heroine like the Lady Marshal, a magically enhanced soldier weary of war and betrayal, can save China from total destruction.  

4.  The Last Dignity of Man  - A brilliant head of a research company, named Alexander Lutheran, finds himself dreaming of being Lex Luthor, and of there being a Superman to stop him, as he leads a company building dangerous new technology for the government and finds himself falling in love with a stranger who he gives a job as a janitor.

5.  Where the Heart Lives - An unwanted girl is given away to help a woman who lives on the edge of town and maintains a graveyard for the unwanted, and finds herself seeing spirits trapped in a magical wood, and discovers for the first time what it means to find love.  

6.  After the Blood - After a plague destroys most of humanity, self-sufficient groups like the Amish are the few groups best setup to survive....but the plague has brought forth something else, as magical forests have also grown filled of monsters, and a young woman and her two friends from an Amish community find themselves transformed in ways that their religion and families aren't quite able to accept...

7.  The Tangleroot Palace - A wild princess of a kingdom besieged by mercenaries and raiders finds herself betrothed by her beloved father to a barbarian warlord famed for his ruthlessness, and seeks a way to both keep her freedom and not to doom her kingdom in a dangerous magical forest known for changing all those who enter.

All of these stories are well done, with the story I liked the least (After the Blood) being one that a friend mentioned was a real favorite of her own, so obviously there are no real stinkers here.  Still, a couple of the stories, like The Tangleroot Palace, Where the Heart Lives, and Sympathy for the Bones are kind of predictable and not that unusual, even if they're well done.  And there aren't any real "oh my god you must read this" moments in the other stories either.  One of these stories incidentally, Where the Heart Lives, serves as a distant prequel apparently to Liu's "Dirk and Steele" series, but works perfectly well if (like me) you have no knowledge of that series.  

Still, The Last Dignity of Man is the stand-out of the collection for me, showing a seemingly genius industrialist trying to be Lex Luthor....not because he wants to be an evil super genius rich businessman, but because he wants there to be someone good to balance him out, to stop him, and...for him to love.  It's a story that fits really well in today's world with seemingly unchecked powerful businessmen doing things without any accountability, and Alexander's quest to find someone to love and to hold his terrifying potential in check is beautifully well done, even as it refuses to give an easy romantic ending.  

And both The Briar and the Rose and Call Her Savage work fairly well in different ways.  The Briar and the Rose pulling a spin on Sleeping Beauty that removes the consent problem, as the protagonist's love is a second mind in the same body only awake once a week who she wants to rescue, so there's nothing nonconsensual about her love and desperation to save her.  It's really sweet, even if anticlimactic in its ending.  Call Her Savage uses an alternate history, a steampunk world, and magic to show a beleaguered and tired warrior coming back to fight when the one who betrayed her, and who betrayed her heart, returns fighting again for the other side, and works pretty strongly as well.  

In short, this is a fine collection of Liu's short fiction, that makes me interested in reading more of her work...but doesn't really make me want to make much extra effort to seek it out.  It's a fine fun read, with some solid moments, but it never truly hits the highlights of some other collections I've read, that make those collections must buy for any reader.