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In the Vanisher's Palace by Aliette de Bodard

 
​An intense and emotional tale, set in a sci-fi world based on Vietnamese mythology. Yên is a young teacher, given to a dragon by her village in exchange for a healing. The dragon, Vu Côn, needs a teacher for her two children, to teach them the things she could not. Yèn and the dragon find a deep connection, and deep divisions. Yên's future seemingly rests in the scaly hands of the dragon. But this is a twisting, inconstant world, and things may not always be as they seem
The setting might be a fantasy world, with shape-shifting dragons, palaces with infinite rooms, spells and summonings, but it is also a world of gene-modding, isolation skins, and the remnants of technology so far beyond present-day that it becomes magic. A race called the Vanishers has broken the world and then departed, and those left behind must cope with the diseases and constructs they left behind. I hesitate to call it post-apocalyptic, because that belongs to a genre with certain expectations. Here, there is poverty and squalor in the ruins of a civilization, but one can also summon a dragon to beseech it to heal a dying child.

The Vietnamese mythology adds to alien nature of the world. It fits well to the fluid, non-euclidean spaces of the palace that the dragon inhabits. The imagery of trails of ink, calligraphed words flowing in shadows, and flowing rivers is evocative and rich. Scents – of tea, of cooking, of mold, of rivers – are often used to reflect the mood and emotion of a scene. 

This is a rich and satisfying story, which addresses the difference between false power, such as that the village elders wield without wisdom or compassion, and the real powers that a dragon, or a teacher, may have. 

I picked it up without reading the blurb that mentioned the Beauty and the Beast, and I didn't make that connection while reading it. I'm glad that I was able to read it without the preconceptions that linking it to the fairy tale will inevitably induce. I think it's stronger by itself.

10/25/2018


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    About these recommendations

    In this series, we bring you a selection of books that we enjoyed, and highlight the qualities that made them work for us.

    We're not assigning ratings. We're saying what we enjoyed, while at the same time paying attention to the craft of writing and to those who we feel do it well.
    ​
    As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

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Picture
Cover painting © Rene Aigner
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