This is a story set in Kushner's Riverside world, and although it ties in to those books, it's not necessary to have read those first, since its protagonist is a new character, in a setting we haven't encountered before. A young woman, Bright Phoenix, lives with her grandmother, a canny merchant who denigrates Bright Phoenix on her appearance and the low birth of her mother's family. The only joy Bright Phoenix has is in her music… but then a foreign trader comes to their house, but what she's trading for is not necessarily what it seems. I liked this story a lot, although it was pretty predictable in the "merchant who thinks she's fleecing a customer is actually getting fleeced in return" kind of way. (And also I spent most of the story trying to rack my brains to figure out how it was connected to Riverside.) But I like Kushner's writing, and the world she builds.