Returning again with another book review, this time I just finished the novel The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong.
In the book we follow Tao, an immigrant fortune-teller from the Shinaran Empire, who travels around her adopted home country of Eshtera with her wagon and trusty mule, reading peoples’ fortunes. Although, the fortunes Tao reads, are only small ones – when it will rain again, which boy will the barmaid kiss, will the harvest be plentiful this year etc.
On her way, Tao will find herself in the company of new co-travelers, in the form of a former warrior, a (semi) reformed thief, a young baker and a cat, who will soon become her friends, as they search for the warrior’s missing daughter.
The story has many themes of immigration, racism, integration into a new culture and the preservation of the old one. Tao is a Shinn immigrant, ripped away from her ancestral home and facing a lot of discrimination by the new society she lives in. Her mother on the other hand, has made sure to integrate as much as she can into Eshteran society, ditching the culture and ideas she was born with for new ones. It seems to me that Shinara and Eshtera clearly represent Asian and European cultures respectively – with one clearly trying to dominate the other.
Although this is a cozy fantasy story, there’s certainly a fair a mount of action in it, as the band of misfits travels through the country in search of the missing child. The worldbuilding is light but satisfactory, and gives enough clues for me to want to see this world further, while I quite enjoyed the characters themselves, and the way they were presented in the text.
So, in conclusion, I’d recommend this book to someone that wants a slower-burn adventure. There’s enough action and enough calm to satisfy lovers of both tropes in my opinion, and the book itself isn’t all that long.
by A_Guy195