I was drawn to the beautiful cover of The Emperor and the Endless Palace (2024) displayed on the “New” shelf at my local library. I was thrilled to find out it was one of my favorite genres–historical fantasy–and it was super-queer!
Huang takes us to three different time periods. First in time is the year 4 BCE, where we meet Dong Xian, an ambitious clerk in the court of a Han Dynasty Emperor. Second is 1740 with He Shican, an innkeeper in a remote forest who believes he has met a fox spirit, who beguiles humans and may lead them to their deaths. Finally, in the present-day, River lives in Los Angeles with his sister and is overwhelmed by his first Yellow Peril party–a kind of bacchanalia for queer Asian men.
But the epigraph that set up these three stories is beautiful and intriguing:
What if I told you that the feeling we call love is actually the feeling of metaphysical recognition, when your soul remembers someone from a previous life?
How would that change the way you look at each stranger, knowing that they could be the epic romance across all of your lifetimes?
Through the intrigues and dangers of the palace life, where Dong Xian meets and falls in love with the Emperor, and present-day, when River meets a mysterious man named Joey who is involved with the famous tech mogul Winston Chow, and He Shican tries to assist the visitor to his inn, and his grandmother, Huang weaves similarities in the stories and timelines until it is clear that these souls have come together and apart, searching for each other, finding each other, and have had circumstances separate them, over and over and over again for millenia.
It was beautifully done, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I will consider it weight-neutral, as there were no descriptions of fat bodies, either positive or negative.
Reading While Fat 
wow, great review. i will have to pick it up!
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