Briar, bodyguard for a body-stealing sorceress, discovers her love for Rose, whose true soul emerges only once a week. An apprentice witch seeks her freedom through betrayal, the bones of the innocent, and a meticulously-plotted spell. In a world powered by crystal skulls, a warrior returns to save China from invasion by her jealous ex. A princess runs away from an arranged marriage, finding family in a strange troupe of traveling actors at the border of the kingdom's deep, dark woods.
Concluding with a gorgeous full-length novella, Marjorie Liu's first short fiction collection is an unflinching sojourn into her thorny tales of love, revenge, and new beginnings.
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THE FUNERAL WAS IN A BAD PLACE, but Martha Bromes never did much care for such things, and so she put her husband into a hole at Cutter's and we as her family had to march up the long stone track into the hills to find the damn spot, because the only descent bits of earth in all that place were far deep in the forest, high into the darkness. SYMPATHY FOR THE BONES
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(@TachyonPub, 15 June 2021, 256 pages, ebook, #ARC from the publisher via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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This is a new author for me. I like reading short stories of an author I haven't read before. It can be a good way of getting to know an author's style. I thought the stories in The Tangleroot Palace were all excellent. I'll definitely read more of the author's work. The stories are an interesting mix of fantasy, horror and some original mythology. In my experience, most story collection has at least one that doesn't quite work but every story in this collection is excellent. I liked the fact the stories are all quite different. I enjoyed all of the stories but my favourites were Sympathy For The Bones, The Briar And The Rose and the title story.
