I ended up DNFing this book - it wasn't quite working out for me. It might be one I revisit some day, but it's not quite right for me now. Thank you to the publisher for providing me a copy for review!

An intense collection of masterfully crafted tales by a truly stupendous wordsmith. Each story boasts brilliant characters and awesome stories.

The Tangleroot Palace is a collection of short fantasy stories by Marjorie M. Liu, who is clearly a talented writer, and whose prose is as magical as the content of the stories themselves. Nonetheless, I found the collection was a bit too eclectic for me and would've preferred a bit more cohesion, or a stronger common thread. I’m sure someone else would love that she moves between fantasy sub-genres but I personally felt it was a bit jarring.

This is a short story collection, from the writer of Monstress, and as usual with these collections, some stories hit better than others, but overall I very much enjoyed these dark fairy tale style tales, especially the one it’s named after. There are some fully fresh stories, others are reimaginings of more known fairy tales, such as Sleeping Beauty. The atmosphere in all of them really pulls you in, and though quite long I flew through this collection.

I’m not always a fan of short story collections (only because I always want them to carry on) but something drew me into this and I’m so glad I did, this contains 7 short and unique stories covering witches, vampires, knights and princesses. The stories are so enthralling and addictive, Marjorie Liu’s writing is beautiful as always, if like me you may not reach for a collection of short stories then definitely pick this book up, you’ll be so glad you did.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

3.5 stars. Seven short stories of which I really enjoyed six (not a bad hit rate), Six of the stories are fantasy, one is science fiction. All the stories have a fairy tale feel, with strong female lead characters. Great for fans of Angela Slatter.

I never read anything by this author before and I was attracted by the cover. It was a good choice because the author can write and I fell in love with these stories and the storytelling.
There’s different type of stories and, even if they’re not all at the same level, they’re well plotted and fascinating.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

For this review I have decided to rate each story and tell you my opinions as I felt that was fair. Some of the stories I loved and some I didn't however, I feel like this common with collections of short stories. Overall I would rate this collection 3/5 stars.

Sympathy for The Bones 3/5
Unfortunately this story did not have me hooked straight away. I did however love how dark it was and the witchy feel of it. I also enjoyed the story as a whole and I liked the themes of family, revenge and freedom. I think for this one to be more than 3 stars I needed to either feel more connected to the characters or for the story to have more of a shock or intregue value.

The Briar and The Rose 5/5
This is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. Now I love Disney's Sleeping Beauty and some of the different interpretations of this story despite never reading the original (Sun Moon and Talia). This version was different to any others I have read but had almost a Grimm's fairy tale feel to it. I genuinely loved this version and thought it was written really well! I would love to read more fairytale retelling like this one.


Call Her Savage 2/5
I don't know why but I really struggled to get into this story and don't really enjoy it much. It is a steampunk tale where China is at war with England. I have to be honest I don't really remember much about it and felt lost a lot of the time.

Where The Heart Lives 4/5
This was a beautiful story about a woman trying to save someone from 20 years ago. I found this to be super fascinating and to be honest I would have loved to have a whole book about this story. This is supposed to be a prequel to some of Marjorie M Liu's work so I will definitely be picking them up soon to see what I think.

The Light And The Fury 2/5
I felt like this story had been rushed which was unfortunate. I really liked the concept of this story but I feel like it should have either been a full novel or a little bit longer so that we could have connected with the story or characters a little bit more.

The Last Dignity Of Man 4/5
This is a bitter sweet tale about someone who has admired Lex Luthor and models his life on Lex Luthor's. The main character wants to be good and he wants to be loved however, he is conflicted and lonely. It's a sad story and it is written so well!

After The Blood 4/5
This is a sequel to another one of Marjorie M Liu's novellas and I definitely feel like I want to read that now. I felt as if the world in this story had been described so well that it was hard not to picture it and get lost in the story. I love most vampire stories and this one was also heartbreaking so what wasn't there to like?

The Tangleroot Palace 3/5
I loved that this was a princess story with lots of mystical elements. It was a true fantasy story. I really liked the characters and I thought that the story was cute. However, I preferred some of the other short stories in this collection so felt a little bit let down when this was the main story.

Overall, I liked a lot of the stories in this collection and if you like the sound of any of the stories I would recommend picking this up!

Big thank you to NetGalley for sending me this e-book ARC to read!

A beautiful collection of slyly twisted tales – part fairy tale, part folklore, part horror. Liu’s take is subtle, slightly menacing and very satisfying, told in her characteristic beautiful prose. Highly recommend.

3.5 stars [<i>this rating was going to be a solid 3 until I got to 'Tangleroot Palace', at which point I rated it higher. As I struggled to finish one of the stories I did round down though</i>]

The Tangleroot Palace (and other short stories) is a collection of short stories with fantastical/magical elements to them. Based in different times/spaces, these stories all read quite differently and I find it challenging to summarise my thoughts without going into the specific feelings on each of the short stories included.

I particularly liked the stories 'Briar and the Rose' (<spoiler>WLW love story</spoiler>), 'Where the Heart Lives' and the 'Tangleroot Palace' - the latter two both involving magical forests!

I personally DNF'ed the stories 'Light and the Fury' and 'After the Blood' - I just couldn't read past a certain number of pages and kept re-reading with little interest as to what happened. I am glad I didn't give up entirely though because the stories in between those two were worthwhile.

This was a mixed bag for me but I really did enjoy the three stories named above despite my difficulty with others.

<i>I was provided with a complimentary ARC by Titan Books (via NetGalley) in exchange for an honest review.</i>

A short review for this collection as unfortunately it didn’t really click with me. I love Liu’s Monstress so was expecting this to be a set of stories I could relate to but unfortunately I found the tales in the majority to have a slow measured style that is not really how I enjoy my short fiction. We get varied tales from a would be super villain with an unfortunate sounding but very familiar name, alternate steampunk magical wars between China and Great Britain over opium; a female bodyguard dealing with a witch inhabiting the body of the woman she loves; and a young witch being very ruthless with her bid for freedom. They’re dark, imaginative but I really struggled to get sucked into the stories. I did find the stories felt very over descriptive which is not my favourite type of prose but not sure why this really lost me. Liu is a very capable writer clearly able to bounce between genres and I’ll definitely sample more of their work I the future but this one for me sadly was a case of not you but me. There are many reviewers loving this so I actually think this may be just the reading mood I was in this week but I would suggest if curious give this a try.

All I can really ask myself after reading this book is why have I never come across this author before?

The book consists of a series of short stories around the central theme of the Tanglewood. The author clearly possesses a staggering imagination and I savoured every single minute of this immersive collection.

I think the short story approach really works with these kinds of books similar to Tales from the Hinterland by Melissa Albert which was also excellent.

Honestly I can't find anything to fault it, a fantastic piece of work.

This short story collection by Marjorie Liu is lush with delicious world-building and expressive prose. Each story brings a different feeling.
Briar and Rose is a captivating retelling of the traditional Sleeping Beauty fairytales which acknowledges the horror of Rose’s unconscious body being used without her consent, and lets her find an escape.
In a case of wilful nominative determinism, Alexander Lutheran uses his company to let scientists play God because he’s in love with the idea of the flying man in a red cape.
Magical murder and vampires and revisions of history, Liu’s approach to storytelling occasionally veers to the side of the opaque, and sometimes it takes either patience or puzzling for the details of a story to become clear. But even when I was lost with the plot, I was enchanted with the way she wove words into evocative descriptions and quiet moments between characters.

While I’d already well and truly fallen in love with Monstress, I hadn’t read anything else by this author. After being wowed by this collection, I will now be working to rectify this egregious mistake.

Sympathy for the Bones

Clora works with bone needles and thread. She doesn’t make mistakes.

“Fear of a hoodoo woman was natural. Fear was how it had to be.”

The Briar and the Rose

In this retelling of Sleeping Beauty, we meet the Duelist who, on Sundays, is called Briar. While six days a week are devoted to violence, the seventh contains love.

“The Duelist had learned, long ago, that oppression could be defeated only through study; like a sword, the mind must always be tended to if it was to aim true.”

The Light and the Fury

Superheroes, war and crystal skulls.

““Can you be what they need?”
“No,” she said quietly. “But I can try.””

The Last Dignity of Man

His mother named him Alexander Lutheran. Wasn’t it inevitable that he would aspire to become Lex Luthor?

“And he has lived up to that name, in more ways than one.”

Where the Heart Lives

This story take place in the Dirk & Steele universe, well before the events of the first book in the series. Although I tend to stay as far away from romance novels as possible, I’m intrigued enough to want to dive into the first book.

““We all have our homes,” she said quietly. “The ability to choose yours is not a gift to take for granted.””

After the Blood

Amish vampires! A sequel to the novella, The Robber Bride, which I now need to read.

“Only so long a man could keep secrets while living under his family’s roof.”

Tangleroot Palace

When Sally’s father arranges for her to be married to the Black Knight of the Poisoned Cookies (not his real name), she decides to turn to the Tangleroot forest for help. It’s not like she’s got anything to lose.

Bonus points to the raven in the tree next door that believes in book-life symmetry, waiting to caw until the exact moment the raven in the story did.

“Most people, when they have questions, ask other people. They do not go running headfirst into a place of night terrors and magic.”

It is rare for me to love a short story collection more than I love the idea of it but this one exceeded my expectations.

The Light and the Fury was the only story I wasn’t immediately captivated by. The rest, I adored, but none more so than The Last Dignity of Man.

Content warnings include mention of death by suicide, death of animals, miscarriage and sexual assault.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Titan Books for the opportunity to fall in love with this collection.

This is a funny - but fun - set of short stories from Marjorie Liu - who I mainly know from her comics work. And like Monstress these tales are broadly fantasy themed, as she notes herself, often themed around forests. All have female protagonists bar one (the outlier her - a Lex Luthor pining for a Superman story), and nearly all seem to come from prompts for other collections. So a new take on a fairy tale allows Liu to have a queer take on Sleeping Beauty that allows the princess to have some agency in the end. A prompt to write about a noneymoon from hell piques her distaste for honeymoons: if you are writing to a prompt it is always a good idea to throw out most of the prompt, or subvert it.

Liu writes good clear engaging prose with a flair for the mildly creepy, her natural ground does seem to be the witches and forests that populate this book, and she does tap into what feels like a particularly American take on the wilderness and the witch out of town. The title tale, the longest and more of a novella, is probably the most original and yet most classical fairy tale style piece here (when subverting fairy tales she bends them out of shape, when inventing she is happier to hew to form). In general the quality and form is kept up throughout (perhaps the sort of vampire tale is a little muddy, though it seems that leans on other mythology she has written).

The seven stories in The Tangleroot Palace are all good reads, and whilst i wouldn't say aimed at them, certainly YA accessible. It does feel a little like the sweepings of things that haven't been collected, there are unsurprisingly thematic resonances and surprising (to her) repetitions of forestry in particular. Not essential by any means, but actually not a bad bridge from her comics work to her prose work.

⭐️3.75

If you like retellings with a dark twist or enjoy magical and haunting stories, this is definitely for you.

The book consists of 7 short stories, each of them unique in their own way. From evil witches, to vampires and skillful solders, this book has it all. The stories are so captivating and easy to follow and the writing is beautiful and unique. I hadn’t read anything by this author before, but I’ll make sure to keep my eye on her now.

If you want to read something short, which is also page-turning and is gonna provide you with some fantasy content with plenty of dark twists, then this is certainly a book for you✨

I came across this book on NetGalley and the title – “The Tangleroot Palace” was the first thing to intrigue me. I’m so glad I requested it and was lucky enough to get approved for it. From the first page, the author’s words caught my attention and held it, refusing to let go.

The Tangleroot Palace is a collection of 7 short stories and usually, for this type of novel, I’d review the book as a whole. But there was such depth and individuality to each story that it’s only fair to review each one.

1 – Sympathy For The Bones
This was such a creepy little story and bloody fantastic in its creepiness about fairness and justice and the difference between helping someone out of the kindness of your heart and helping only to keep someone beholden to you. A lesson the young girl forced into apprenticeship to a Blair-type witch learned in time to save as much of her soul as she could. Is there forgiveness and redemption for acts committed when you had no other choice to try to save your soul? I want to think so, at least for this young girl who should have had people to love and care for her.

2 – The Briar and The Rose
Stuck in your own body, helpless to do anything but watch and scream inside. And the desperation of one who would do anything to release that imprisoned soul. It was heartbreaking to see the struggle and the pain. I wanted more details on the conclusion but it was an apt ending so it didn’t disappoint.

3 – The Light and The Fury
There’s nothing pretty about war – no dignity, no honor. One woman alone, longing for peace but burdened with saving her people. Another intriguing plot-line, centering around crystal skulls, which can be fascinating but personally, I find kind of creepy at the same time.

4 – The Last Dignity of Man
I found this one to be a heartbreaking story despite the creepy element – the hopeless, never-ending search for a cherished wish and the desperate struggle to find a way to get past the heartbreak of knowing that wish would never come true. The ending hit me totally out of the blue, I did not see that coming but it stayed with me for a long time.

5 – Where The Heart Lives
Oh, this is definitely one of my favorites in this collection. I have a soft spot for paranormal romance and I loved the main characters. You couldn’t help but love Lucy and Barnabus. And the romance between them was intense yet sweet at the same time.

6 – After The Blood
Ah, this collection wouldn’t be complete without at least one vampire story with an apocalyptic bend to it, and tragedy and heartbreak. I loved Amanda and you can’t help but empathize with her and Henry, our tortured vampire.

7 – The Tangleroot Palace
One last story to round off the collection and leave you with smiles. I loved Salinda and Mickel and the plot-line was predictable but not without its charm.

For a collection of short stories, the 7 stories did not feel like short stories. They left a hell of an impact on me and with a wish for more. The author’s writing was a pleasure to read and I am definitely getting The Tangleroot Palace in hardback for my collection.

I'm such a fan of Marjorie Liu (author of Monstress) that when I saw this book on NetGalley I didn't even read the synopsis before requesting it and I would do it again.

Instead of being another graphic novel like I was expecting, it ended up being a collection of short stories written throughout the years, alongside a short comment by the author, giving the story a bit of context both to when it was written and to how it had aged.

Sympathy for the Bones

In this story perfect for your dark cottagecore loving heart, a girl raised by a witch slowly learns her mother's trade.

This is a very disturbing story touching on themes such as abusive families, death and grief but it is more importantly a story about a young woman taking control of her situation and building the life she wants.
It reminded me a bit of Spinning Silver and For the Wolf tone-wise in how it refused to make apologies for bad people and harmful beliefs and didn't force girls to make themselves smaller and wait to be saved.

Briar and Rose

This sapphic retelling of The Sleeping Beauty might have been my absolute favourite out of all of them.

Albeit one of the simpler and shortest tales, the characters in it felt as real and complex as if I had spent an entire novel with them. In fact, I wish I could have.
The ending was beautiful and all I could have wanted and I would love to see this adapted in any form from a graphic novel to an animation.

Call her savage

I would read an entire series in this universe and then binge-watch the movies. Think Star Wars meet The Man in the High Castle meets The Mortal Engines.

This was one of the most complex and longer stories, following a war hero going on one last suicide mission to kill her former lover.
It touches on themes such as colonialism, race, war, revenge and jealousy as two people that could have had a love story in a better world meet to kill each other after years apart.
When the ending came, I was not ready for it.

The last dignity of man

This felt like an Ao3 fever dream and I loved every moment it hurt me.

In this story, a lonely young billionaire is obsessed with Superman so he models himself after Lex Luthor. After striking up a conversation with a homeless man, he gives him a job in his company and slowly falls in love with him, looking forward to any interactions or attention from his crush.
This was a story about loneliness and pain and I spent the entire time rooting if not for these two characters to be together then for them to find some peace and love through their friendship.
I finished it knowing only one thing: I need more.

Where the heart lives

This was the first story set in the Dirk & Steele universe but you don't need to have read it beforehand as this is a prelude to those.

This felt like a dark academia setting: we have the huge gothic mansion, the found family, and magic that is never explained (although that might be because I haven't read Dirk & Steele). We also have women standing up for themselves in a sexist world, mentioning abusive families and a slow burn romance.

After the blood

The second tale in the Dirk & Steele universe is set in the future, in a post-pandemic world where all technology failed and magic and vampires exist.

Our heroine lives close to an Amish town and deals with both the good and the bad of their culture.
Once again, I didn't understand the magic system and world enough for this story to become one of my favourites but I loved the themes it dealt with from discrimination, community and most importantly: it was a tale about different kinds of love and I adored how romantic love was not seen as the best or more important just one type.
Something else I truly loved was our heroine and how the other characters interacted with her. She was always the person with the gun, the defender, the physical threat against those that would hurt her and those she held dear and I really liked seeing a woman portrayed in such a manner.

The Tangleroot Palace

A princess rejects the responsibility others put on her to marry a monstrous man and decides instead to run away to a magical forest to find a solution to her kingdom's problems or at the very least to avoid them.
This reminded me a lot of A court of Thornes and Roses series, particularly when it came to flawed, human parents, the importance placed on friendship and the stories we tell about ourselves to the world in order to protect what we love.
Once again I didn't really connect with the magic system but I liked the feminist spin on marriage and the heroine's quick wit.

Conclusions

I had never read anything from Marjorie Liu before apart from her Monstress series so I went into this book with high expectations but was afraid I would be disappointed.
What I found were seven wonderful short stories, six of them headed by heroines, most of them following queer characters. No matter where or when, what these stories also had in common was that they were about love: unrequited, vengeful, romantic, familial or between friends and community and how that makes a difference in the world.

Thank you to NetGalley and Titan books for this DRC.

“Rumors could cast a spell just as powerful as needle and thread.”

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this book!

I downloaded Marjorie Liu’s Monstress on Apple Books, but I never really got around to reading it. Now I have to bump it up in my TBR because this collection of short stories was so good! I loved the authors note added to each short story.

I enjoyed most of the stories in here. They were eerie, folklorish and fun. Plus, the author's note of the story of the story was so interesting.
Favorites are Sympathy for the Bones, an eerie horror and Briar and The Rose, a retelling of the Sleeping beauty but centering women.
Definitely recommended.