The Teller of Small Fortunes (Julie Leong)

The Teller of Small Fortunes
Julie Leong
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: The Shinn woman Tao travels far and wide across the land of Eshtera in her mule-drawn wagon, using her gifts of seeing to tell fortunes to farmers and villagers... but small fortunes only. Seeing big events carries too great a burden, and draws too big a price - something she has only tried once, and something she vows never to do again. This is part of why she travels; the royal Guild of Mages would love to get their hands on a seer, and they wouldn't care about the cost. The other part is that she never feels like she truly belongs in this land, her Shinn features marking her as a foreigner among the pale Eshterans for all that she barely remembers her native language. It is a lonely life, forever on the road and on the run, but at least she is free.
A chance encounter on the road lands her in the company of a pair of roving ex-mercenaries, one a "reformed" thief and the other desperately searching for the young daughter who disappeared while he was away on campaign. Tao doesn't want traveling companions, and if she did, she likely wouldn't have picked these two, but fate seems to have other ideas. Like it or not, Tao's solo journeys will have to wait, as she becomes more entangled in the lives of these strangers, and others encountered with them, than she ever intended... so entangled that her past, and the guild, may finally catch up to her.

REVIEW: This one was advertised as a "cozy fantasy", riding a current wave of the subgenre's popularity. It is, indeed, cozy, with fairly low stakes, a focus on characters and found family, and no real baddies or scary stuff. At some point, though, the blunted edges and rosy golden glow become a little tiresome, and fail to hide some weaknesses underneath the story.
Things start well and cozy enough, as Tao rides into a village and resolves her first crisis - missing goats - with minimal fuss, while establishing the world and how the people view "exotic" foreigners like herself, an Asian-analog race from across the sea, with whom relations have been fraught lately. Tao herself has an ambivalent relationship with her own heritage. On the one hand, she loves her memories of childhood and the father she lost too soon, while on the other she sees it as one more barrier between herself and the people around her, her features a permanent brand marking her as different and other, no matter how well she speaks the local tongue. Tao may lean into the trappings of her Shinn blood to promote her small fortune-telling business, but can't help regretting and resenting how it creates a barrier... though, of course, she tells herself she doesn't need or even want companionship anyway. It's only when given no other choice that she reluctantly accepts Mash and Silt, a solid soldier/little thief pair cut from the (over)familiar genre cloth as Leiber's classic duo Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, as fellow travelers. They, too, don't intend to become close to the fortune-teller, but nevertheless they wind up warming up to each other as friends, each finding in the group something they were missing in their lives before. Tao strives to keep herself separate even as she works to help the others, but can't hold herself aloof forever, and is surprised to realize that she has wants and needs in her life as well - and that, much as she tries to embrace the lonely traveler life, she could really use a friend.
There is, from the outset (and throughout), a soft, warm glow of "cozy" about the whole story and the characters. Some lip service is given to rough pasts and inequalities and other grounding elements, but overall the world feels vague and hazy and bubble-wrapped, to the point where one can predict that, even when things look slightly bad, nothing will ever be particularly unpleasant or even vaguely discomfiting for very long. Some elements are too predictable early on, and others feel like pointless, page-eating tangents that never really deliver. The whole eventually started feeling like someone constantly hugging and coddling the reader, force-feeding them warm tea, always reassuring them that things will be all right even when it may look momentarily like it's not... and there are a few "surprises" where, honestly, nobody in the cast should've been that stupid for that long, even in a world this fuzzy-slipper cozy. By the end, it just felt too puffy and insubstantial and forcibly "feel all good all the time" to be really satisfying to me, though that probably says more about me than the story.

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