A review by nmcannon
In the Vanishers' Palace by Aliette de Bodard

emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

 My 2021 Reading Challenge is going to be super long mlm doorstoppers and bite-sized wlw novellas, it seems. I'm on a roll with these. I picked up In the Vanishers' Palace for a couple reasons: (1) my wife just read it and loved it; (2) the new Trash & Treasures podcast is doing an episode on it, and hey, it's nice to read along; and (3) I've been meaning to read Aliette de Bodard since forever! 

At around 145 pages, In the Vanishers’ Palace tells a complex story. In a magical Vietnam reeling from the invasion, and then abrupt disappearance of, the alien Vanishers, Yên is a failed scholar who returned to her village in disgrace. She’s been awkwardly shuffled off to her assist her aging mother in healing and educating the village’s youth, but both of them live under constant threat. Once the village’s elders deem someone has lost their “use” to the village, the person is sacrificed to the Vanishers’ constructs, bloodthirsty inventions who haunt the forest. If that isn’t bad enough, pollution and magical retroviruses run rampant. When the headwoman’s daughter is infected, Yên’s mother calls upon a dragon spirit to heal her, but the dragon demands a sacrifice too. Volunteering as tribute, Yên is whisked away to a palace out of an M.C. Escher painting, and the dragon, Vu Côn, asks her to…tutor her children. Yên’s surprised, to say the least. It doesn’t help that Vu Côn is super attractive. 

Reading the other reviews, many readers remark that the world is too complicated or confusing. I will admit it’s a lot, especially for so short a book. However, while I wasn’t always sure exactly what a Vanisher is or why the palace is Like That, I always knew what elements stood for. Vanishers are colonizers, and the repercussions of them are metaphors for colonization’s devastating after-effects. I’m unsure if something went sideways with the book’s marketing, but some readers went in expecting a story exactly like the Disney Beauty and the Beast movie but queer, and no, this is much more complicated that that. And also not YA. If a reader is patient, everything’s explained in more clear terms later in the novella. 

As for my own reading experience, I’m a little bit obsessed with de Bodard’s writing style. Her words are at once under-stated, but evocative. She somehow made me literally nauseous and dizzy with her descriptions of the palace, just like Yên is. The blending of the hard science and linguistic magic is something I haven’t seen so well-done since G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, and Wilson’s one of my favorite authors. If I had a quibble, Yên and Vu Côn seemed to spend more time in denial than being in love. Then again, that’s more my personal preference when it comes to romance.

All in all, I love In the Vanishers’ Palace. A masterfully told tale that knows the story it wants to tell. I’m already reading Fireheart Tiger and very excited to delve deeper into de Bodard’s bibliography. 
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