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A review by eshalliday
The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie Liu
5.0
Marjorie Liu has collected together 8 years’ worth of shorter works that have peppered her writing career whilst she was publishing longer novels, and her award-winning work for Marvel comics.
Liu’s authorial comments that bookend each short work are illuminating – she expounds either her methodology or the spark that set the particular story alight.
Her feminist and pro-LGBT themes are what attracted me to the collection to begin with, but what I wasn’t expecting was for her messages of empowerment and visibility to be so elegantly and compellingly drawn. Frankly, these stories moved me.
The importance of the book industry publishing texts that centre on the spectrum of relationships between women, cannot be overstated. What Marjorie Liu has crafted here are stories that somehow manage to normalise women’s experiences by situating that gynocentrism in a dynamic range of high fantasy, hard sci-fi, paranormal, and post-modern fairytale reinventions.
I particularly loved ‘Sympathy for the Bones’ and ‘The Light and the Fury’. The standout piece for me here is ‘The Briar and the Rose’. As Liu comments of its bleak Sleeping Beauty source material:
Liu’s authorial comments that bookend each short work are illuminating – she expounds either her methodology or the spark that set the particular story alight.
Her feminist and pro-LGBT themes are what attracted me to the collection to begin with, but what I wasn’t expecting was for her messages of empowerment and visibility to be so elegantly and compellingly drawn. Frankly, these stories moved me.
The importance of the book industry publishing texts that centre on the spectrum of relationships between women, cannot be overstated. What Marjorie Liu has crafted here are stories that somehow manage to normalise women’s experiences by situating that gynocentrism in a dynamic range of high fantasy, hard sci-fi, paranormal, and post-modern fairytale reinventions.
I particularly loved ‘Sympathy for the Bones’ and ‘The Light and the Fury’. The standout piece for me here is ‘The Briar and the Rose’. As Liu comments of its bleak Sleeping Beauty source material:
‘I wanted to reinvent it as a tale about women, and the power of women, and how woman save each other and themselves through sisterhood and love. As most women I know will tell you, they don’t always sleep a lot – but they fight plenty.’My thanks to Titan books for an advanced copy through Netgalley.