The Teller of Small Fortunes
Nov. 20th, 2024 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThis is a good entry into my current trend of listening to cosy fantasy books.
It tells the story of Tao, displaced from her native land and making her living in a new country by telling 'small fortunes'.
There are themes of racism, a missing five-year-old girl, threats to the main characters from a seemingly authoritarian government, and quite a bit of action involving fantastical monsters.
And yet it's generally a fairly quiet, low-stakes book, about found family (one of my favourite tropes and one that apparently never gets old), imagining people complexly, and finding your place in the world.
It's a bit scattershot and very episodic (and some of the episodes are *quite* weird) but it all comes together very satisfyingly in the end and I really liked the use of fortune-telling throughout.
As with all the cosy fantasy I've read to date, there was also a lot of baked goods...
The audiobook narrator wasn't one of my favourites, but the narration was largely fine.
Overall, very cute and engaging throughout - a fun read.
It tells the story of Tao, displaced from her native land and making her living in a new country by telling 'small fortunes'.
There are themes of racism, a missing five-year-old girl, threats to the main characters from a seemingly authoritarian government, and quite a bit of action involving fantastical monsters.
And yet it's generally a fairly quiet, low-stakes book, about found family (one of my favourite tropes and one that apparently never gets old), imagining people complexly, and finding your place in the world.
It's a bit scattershot and very episodic (and some of the episodes are *quite* weird) but it all comes together very satisfyingly in the end and I really liked the use of fortune-telling throughout.
As with all the cosy fantasy I've read to date, there was also a lot of baked goods...
The audiobook narrator wasn't one of my favourites, but the narration was largely fine.
Overall, very cute and engaging throughout - a fun read.
