Raquel Flockhart's Reviews > The Tangleroot Palace

“Storytellers gave names to everything because they knew, better than anyone, that names were power.”

The Tangleroot Palace is a collection of six short stories and a novella spanning different genres: fantasy, science fiction, alternate history, and dystopia with paranormal elements. Although the author is best known for her graphic novel Monstress, this was my first time reading anything written by her and the experience has been, overall, positive. Below are my thoughts and ratings for each story:

⇢ Sympathy for the Bones: ★★
This first story follows a girl who has been trained for years by an old woman to create dolls using bone needles and fill them with hoodoo in order to kill men. It had all the ingredients to be the kind of dark tale I like, but I found it quite predictable and in my opinion it lacked creating a more suspenseful atmosphere.

⇢ The Briar and the Rose: ★★★★
This is a Sapphic retelling of Sleeping Beauty in which a bodyguard tries to save a woman whose body is inhabited by a witch every day of the week except one. It’s a beautifully written short story about losing agency over your own body.

⇢ Call Her Savage: ★★
This is an alternate history sci-fi story in which China is at war with Great Britain. A marshal with superhuman powers returns to the front after years of retirement to carry out an impossible mission. I was confused during the first half because the author suddenly drops the reader into the middle of the action without offering any kind of context. But once I understood what was happening and got into the story, I still couldn’t get interested in the plot.

⇢ The Last Dignity of Man: ★
I really didn’t like this story at all. A corporate billionaire with a Lex Luthor complex tries to find his Superman while creating giant worms for the government.

⇢ Where The Heart Lives: ★★★
This is a story about a young woman who is sent to work in a house next to a dangerous forest inhabited by a witch. I liked the atmospheric setting, found family aspects and the idea of ​​the enchanted forest.

⇢ After the Blood: ★★★
This is a post-apocalyptic story with Amish vampires and where the protagonist tries to survive and protect the people she loves after a virus killed most of the population. One of the darkest stories in this collection, with plenty of action and a plot that left me wanting to read a full novel about these characters.

⇢ Tangleroot Palace: ★★★★
This novella was my favorite story in the collection. A princess is promised to a warlord and decides to run away and search for answers in a dangerous forest. Along the way she meets a strange troupe and joins them. Even though it’s a very predictable story, I really liked that it read like a fairytale with a curse and a romance at the center.

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