The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong

The Cover of The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong

Dates: Jan. 2 - Jan. 4

2025: 2/100

Rating: 1/5

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I selected this book as my November selection for Book of the Month Club. It is honestly the first selection from this subscription service that I am honestly fully and truly disappointed in. The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong is advertised as a Cozy Fantasy with a gang of adventurers becoming a found family along the way. It falls flat in every aspect.

In an effort to keep with the genre of Cozy Fantasy -- which is known for low stakes, high reward adventure -- the author sends the four main characters on a series of Dungeons and Dragons side quest that revolve around avoiding the coming war and neglecting the two main plot points of "find the five year old girl whose been kidnapped" and "the mage's guild wants me to work for them". While I don't mind books that have low stakes adventure, every solution in The Teller of Small Fortunes became predictable, boring, and insignificant. There was one point where the gang signed a magical and binding contract to complete a task (retrieve a treasure from a cave) by a strange, excentric man who only referred to them as their RPG stereotypes. When they found out that the treasure was the egg of a Phoenix, the gang decided that they can not steal a child from its mother. While this is ultimately fine, there were absolutely no consiquences for their actions. The man just shrugged, went "that's too bad", and left. What was the point of them signing a contract if it wasn't binding?

On top of the entire lack of consiquences, the world building was lackluster at best. It relies heavily on Dungeon and Dragons (Forgotten Realms/Exandria) stereotypes alongside of non-fantasy, real world concepts to build a half completed and bare bones world. The setting of the book is the country of "Estrera", which to my knowledge is basically fantasy Europe. The main group characters travel through numerous small towns and slightly largers city as the book progresses. Very few of these small towns are given discriptions past the name of the town and what general region it is a part of (i.e. Fishing Town, Town in the Mountains, etc.). I don't mind lack of world building in this regard, however, it becames extra noticable when each chapter is in a new town with just as little detail as the last. There were also some real world concepts, like trickle down economics, being explained in the book that felt entirely out of place in this low-fantasy world.

Tao, the main protagonist and the teller of small fortunes, is from the country of "Shinara". Shinara is across the ocean and is very clearly a representation of China. Tao as a Shin experiences micro-aggressions and blatant racism throughout the book. While, as a white enby, cannot speak of the portrayal of racist, I can speak on some of the other minority representation presented in the book. Namely, how this book is -- at least on the BOTM selection page -- promoted as LGBTQ+ represention. However, the only representation of the sort in this book is a lesbian character who is introduced within the first ten pages and during a fortune reading, Tao suggests moves to a nunnery. Considering this a fantasy world, it is frankly playing into harmful streotypes of lesbians and nuns to treat a character as such. Tao very easily could have had the villager go to a lesbian sex commune or a "town where only women were allowed" in place of a nunnery. On top of that, Kina, the adventuring party's baker, is the inventor of the "fortune cookie". I think that there could have been away to integrate fortune cookies into the story, especially with how the established form of income for the group has is baked good and fortunes, but having a white women use Shin (Chinese) characters to sell fortune cookies to villagers leaves a bad taste in my mouth. At the end of the novel, the Head Mage of the Guild gives Tao what is basically a passport that says "don't be racist to this Shin, she saved the country and has promission to be here". While I assume this is address the racism in the book and act as a solution, I doubt that in a country that was repeatedly shown to dislike both the Crown and the Magic Guild would respect a fancy scroll that basically says "don't be mean".

Additionally, Tao -- along with the other three members of the adventuring party, Mash, Silt, and Kina -- had very little character development, and what development did happen was meant to be picked up on between the words on the page as nearly none of it is actually shown. This is particularly evident with Tao and her mother. Tao, who ran away either a decade or three years ago depending on which part of the book you are in, left her step-father and mother's house because of poor treatment, her step-father wishing to "sell" Tao to the Magic Guild, and her mother's belief that her strong "seer" magic was to blame for her father's death. This, like all other conflict in the book, is waved away with very little consequence and an "oops was a big old miss understanding". There could have been some big character moment of standing up for herself, sticking to her guns/beliefs. But instead the author allowed Tao to return and forgive people who treated her horribly. Mash and Silt probably suffered the worse of the group. Like Mash's only personality trait is "I need to find my daughter" and Silt is a bumbling idiot, who is in love with Kina. Kina is some what interesting, but her character fails to "earn" much of the development she see. It is something that just happens and the reader is expected to buy into. By the end of the novel, the reader is expected to understand that these characters are a family now, however, very little development happend to make the found family aspect actually feel earned and that these characters are actually a family now.

As previously mentioned, by the end of the book, certain facts get muddled together and mixed up. Such as how long Tao has been on the run, but also at one point in the final stretch of chapters, Mina says, that "ordinary folk will not know that Estera was preparing for war", however, numerous times throughout the early chapters, those same ordinary folk mention how the crown was preparing for war with the Shin and how that's why they were buying up cotton/grain, etc. By the end of the book, it was very clear that Leong had very little idea of where to take the story and had forgotten about several plot lines that needed to be wrapped up before it could actually be completed. This most notable with the ending of Chapter 17 which read as a very strong concluding chapter. I was shocked that there was fifty pages after that point.

I was looking forward to this book, as there haven't been very few horrible picks from Book of the Month in my year plus I've been subscribed. The writing style was not for me, and overall felt very juvinal. I was shocked that it was not advertised/published as a Young Adult Cozy Fantasy. The writing is flat, one note, and lacked depth. I could have, and would have been, much more forgiving if this was a YA/New Adult novel, but this being an adult fantasy leaves me feeling overall sour on the genre. I think that Leong would have a bright future in the YA fantasy realm, she just has to make the shift.

Up Next: Dating and Dragons by Kristy Boyce

Kiley A. Olchaskey (she/they)

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