The Tangleroot Palace & other stories by Marjorie Liu

(Titan Books, 2022)

Reviewed by John Dodd

I really like Monstress in all its volumes, so I was very interested to read the stories that came purely in words, so when The Tangleroot Palace came up for review, I was straight in there.

‘Sympathy for the Bones’ is a tale of magic and death, of family and the things that we must do for them, no matter what it costs us, no matter where it takes us. Most of all, it was about making your own choices, no matter what the family you have will make of them and living with the consequences or delights of those actions.

‘The Briar and the Rose’, a tale of two women, both of them monsters in their own way, but one with far more to quantify them as such. This isn’t just Sleeping Beauty, this is something else entirely.

‘The Light and the Fury’, monsters and revenge, but the monsters were just people till someone made them into monsters, and who is to say that they aren’t still people, even though others look upon them in different ways. Fascinating look at soldiers and the nature of the service they provide and the cost to them for providing that.

‘The Last dignity of Man’, a parable of why it’s good to believe in heroes and villains, but better not to live your life as if there’s an expectation of them, because you will eventually have to face the truth, and the truth when it emerges, may be more than anyone can bear.

‘Where the Heart Lives’, a tale of what we want against what we can have, of what we need against what we think we need, and the choices that bring us to the lives that we lead and could lead. The use of nonhuman protagonists is well done in this.

‘After the Blood’, Vampires, but not as we know them. The story was interesting from the point of view that most vampires are written from the mould of Dracula, so to read of a different sort, where the religious sensibilities of previous incarnations have been forgotten, was cheerful.

‘The Tangleroot Palace’, what if the princess didn’t want to be saved, what if they were more than capable of saving themselves, and what if they had their own ideas?

What I found myself thinking throughout the collection, is that each of these stories was written in a way that would be more accessible if they were presented as an illustrated story. The descriptions were vivid and detailed, but the nature and extent of the descriptions often had me thinking that, as with all story tellers, there’s a medium in which we’re happiest working. Given Liu’s great success with the graphic novel, I wondered if each of these was one of the stories that never made it to the artist’s pen.

There’s a big difference between graphic stories and written stories, and somewhere in the difference, I didn’t quite connect to this collection of stories. It’s clear that the imagination is there, the worlds are well realised and the same ideas that drove Monstress are still there, the connection between and the bravery of people willing to step beyond their assigned position in life.

While I very much liked the ideas and imagination within, it took me a long time to get through the book, and I wasn’t as enthused as I thought I might have been. There’s nothing wrong with any of the stories, the language is clear and well used, but for some reason it didn’t grip me in the way that other things I’ve read by Liu have.

It could just be the curse that when a writer has produced works of such power, everyone expects everything that they produce to be the same standard, even when it was things that were done before they took their craft to the level they are now at. These are still good, but Liu’s recent works are better.

Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.