Books, cats, tea, and shameless Hamilton puns! This is my sideblog where I post about books I have enjoyed, my favourite book quotes, and reblog pretty book pictures.
Burning Roses by S.L. Huang is a fantasy novella that was not at all what I was expecting it to be. I would normally blame this on my intentional forgetfulness of blurbs, but in this case, I think the blurb also buries the lede. I would describe this book as an amalgamation of Asian (Chinese) fantasy and European fairytales, with a heavier dose of the latter than I expected.
When Rosa (aka Red Riding Hood) and Hou Yi the Archer join forces to stop the deadly sunbirds from ravaging the countryside, their quest will take the two women, now blessed and burdened with the hindsight of middle age, into a reckoning of sacrifices made and mistakes mourned, of choices and family and the quest for immortality.
The story in Burning Roses follows our two protagonists, Rosa and Hou Yi, as they attempt to hunt down magical sunbirds and stop them from wreaking havoc across the country. A seemingly straightforward task, until Rosa starts questioning whether the sunbirds are sentient. As we learn throughout the story, Rosa has a dark past with talking animals
The extent to which the world was supposed to correspond to real countries was not entirely clear to me. My general impression was that most of the story was taking place in fantasy-China (or fantastical China, depending on how you want to interpret it), while Rosa has travelled all the way from fantasy-Spain to be there. Having Rosa be a traveller from foreign lands was an interesting and unexpected element. She provided a reference point for readers more familiar with European fantasy, which was the part I wasn’t really expecting. In any case, the fantasy aspect of the novella was clearly the pertinent point, since the backstories of both characters have them being involved in several well-known fairytales.
I enjoyed this novella, even though it wasn’t what I had expected — more fairytale than wuxia. I recommend Burning Roses to fans of fantasy stories with non-European settings, especially those that also enjoy a sprinkling of fairytales.
4 / 5 stars
First published: September 2020, Tor.com Series: Don’t think so Format read: eARC Source: Publisher via NetGalley
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“It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude,”
So much alliteration. Yet it still is beautiful prose
“Strange isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the page become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are.” ~ Erin Morgernstern, The Starless Sea
Caught up in a strange whim, Shaheryar Malik disposes his collection of books in teetering piles in public spaces. Scattered across Manhattan, his book collection has been abandoned and left to fend for itself at the hands of city dwellers to decide their fates. He doesn’t wish to know what will become of his books, or what may likely happen to them in this unconventional experiment.
