Content warnings: emotional abuse, racism/xenophobia (brief), brief intimate partner violence (forceful grabbing)
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother’s imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a fire that devastated Ephteria’s royal palace. Thanh’s new role as a diplomat places her once again in the path of her first love, the powerful and magnetic Eldris of Ephteria, who knows exactly what she wants: romance from Thanh and much more from Thanh’s home. Eldris won’t take no for an answer, on either front. But the fire that burned down one palace is tempting Thanh with the possibility of making her own dangerous decisions. Can Thanh find the freedom to shape her country’s fate—and her own?
In a nutshell: I’m not going to do justice to the complexity and nuance of this story, but if you’re into somewhat slow (but short) sapphic romance triangles with a dose of political intrigue and a big helping of the fantastical (and you can deal with an emotionally-and briefly physically- abusive character), definitely check this out. And/or if you’re interested in pre-colonial southeast Asian imaginings, give this a read.
I’d heard pretty great things about this very short novella, and it did not disappoint. I didn’t get sucked in immediately–it took like 15 of the roughly 100 pages to hook me and keep me invested, but that’s barely anytime in terms of a full novel. By that point, I remembered WHY I’d heard about this story: that it was a pre-colonial fantasy story about looming colonization set in a Vietnam-esque country, featuring seemingly a full matriarchy, NO male characters, and a royal lesbian romance. (Think a less bloody Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s comic series Monstress, without the art deco/steampunk elements.) So of course past me had been like: gimme.
I wasn’t fully expecting the depth of relationship-building that I got in such a short span of pages, or the way de Bodard so beautifully captured the blaze of first love and the way main character Princess Thanh develops over such a short time span. I appreciated that, for the most part, world-building was pushed to the backburner. Things get explained, and the intricate and delicate machinations of multi-court diplomacy and increasingly aggressive colonial incursions were fairly clear, but that wasn’t the true focus. I don’t love political intrigue, as a rule (to which there are exceptions), so this book’s focus on relationships, power/control, and magic ensured that it was firmly in my wheelhouse. I can’t talk in-depth about how the novella deals with power, control, and magic without spoiling some major things (like the title), so on to:
SPOILER TERRITORY
Thanh’s smoldering desire for colonizing princess Eldris, her former lover, is what hooked me into the story, and the development of their problematic relationship was staggering to see done so well, and in such a nuanced manner, in such a short work. From memories of their initial romantic encounters when Thanh was a child and guest at Eldris’s mother’s court to the current day, when Eldris gradually reveals herself as an emotionally, verbally, and even physically abusive colonizer, the novella doesn’t really shy away from creating a dynamic that’s fraught but understandable. De Bodard drops hints that Eldris is only hiding her bigotry against Thanh’s people and country due to her desire for the princess, signaling both to Thanh and the reader that this girl is (going to be) bad news, but Eldris can also be fairly kind and thoughtful. Toward the end of the book, she even proposes to Thanh, throwing caution and their worry about a diplomatically unacceptable alliance to the wind. It’s a sapphic twist on the traditional princess-and-prince fairy-tale ending, but in this case the happily-ever-after is disrupted. Importantly, it’s NOT disrupted because the pair are women, but because Eldris is a raging, jealous narcissist who cannot abide that Thanh has ‘secretly’ been talking to the other spoiler in the story, the character Giang.
Giang is a spoiler because she’s the firehearted tiger of the title: she’s a fire elemental who was once incarnated into a carved tiger, stolen from her temple, and transported to Eldris’s mother’s palace years before. She’s also, unbeknownst to our main character, been subsisting with Thanh for years, ever since the elemental accidentally set Eldris’s palace on fire and rescued young Thanh from the blaze when no one else remembered her. At the beginning of the novel, Thanh is worried about her seemingly newfound, and uncontrollable, abilities to start small fires; her calligraphy quills, her tea leaves, and a lot of other things have been catching ablaze despite her non-firestarter intentions. Giang appears in private to the princess, and the two tentatively develop feelings even beyond the “Big sister”/”little sister” dynamic they initially adopt. Due to an exquisitely detailed mutual expression of care for one another, the reader gets to see this relationship bloom just as Thanh’s relationship to Eldris withers due to the latter’s abusive tendencies. By the end of the novel, Giang emerges as a valiant protector of her love, scaring Eldris and the contingent from her country back from whence they came. The situation is more complicated than this, really, and involves Thanh reigning in a fully tigered-out Giang a bit earlier, but the result is a caring and STRONG, mutually beneficial relationship between the elemental and the princess. In the process of all of this, Thanh has (somewhat) learned to articulate and assert her own power and control against her domineering mother as well as the foreign contingent, and the novella shows a deepening relationship between mother and daughter on top of everything else. It’s quite a feat to read.
