Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes (2024) is a young Shinn woman in her 20s, Tao, who makes a peripatetic living as a fortuneteller for silver pennies.
She travels in a small wagon pulled by Laohu (a mule whose name translates to “tiger”). She has a watersilk tent she sets up for her business. She uses fortune stones, tea leaves, cups, candles, jars, and other tools of her trade. She is sufficiently perceptive in her fortunetelling that she does not need the props, but they are there as a way for her to communicate with her clients.
In the small town of Necker, she finds a town roiling from the case of missing goats. A farmer is being made to distribute grain for free to feed the search parties and is unhappy that he has to share without being paid. The town itself is economically strained and cannot get him paid until and if the goats are found. Tao helps solve this issue with a mix of common sense and a hint of prescience.
After collecting a small fee, she is on the road again. Tao moves from small town to small town. She has left her childhood home to avoid conscription by the Guild of Mages, which serve the Eshtera government.
She is running from a difficult past, defined by loss. As a teller of small fortunes, she is restraining her larger powers. When she practices her fortunetelling for her clients, she focuses on the positive and on what people can change. She is intimidated by her own larger powers as a Seer, which can reveal larger truths beyond those of individuals. She can project into the world and see larger fates that may be more difficult to sway.
Tao not only reads fortunes, but she reads human nature. As a traveling foreigner from Shinara, she faces many who are skeptical and discriminatory. She knows not to overstay her welcome in any town because people change when her fortunetelling is revealed to reveal truth.
People think they want true fortunes, but they don’t really. What they want are lies. Small lies, big lies, entertaining lies, comforting lies. They want to sigh over handsome strangers that they’ll never meet. They want to imagine themselves long-lost royalty. The want to hear a harmless fantasy from a charlatan and then go home and carry on feeding the goats the next day.
People do not want to be seen in full clarity. Their suspicion turns to fear turns to anger, which makes them dangerous to her. Tao is a person who is essentially alone in the world.
Along the way, she falls in with Mash, a farmer with warrior skills and aspirations to poetry and song. He shares of his wife, Anna:
Her hair is like a fishing net
Cast upon my shores
Its knotty threads have quite beset
The slant of my heart’s oars
Mash is with his friend of the road, Silt, a semi-reformed thief, who is on the constant lookout for opportunity. Mash is seeking his disappeared daughter, Leah, whom he thinks was kidnapped by Raiders. Silt is seeking treasure and adventure. They become her “two unwanted escorts of dubious reputation.”
There are benefits of having road companions that have survival skills. At the Drunken Sprite bar, the group is given some room:
Mash made his way through the crowd easily; even the drunkest of patrons sobered enough to move out of the way once they saw him coming. Tao hurried along in his wake, a bobbing raft behind a frigate.
Along the way, they meet Kina, who is an apprentice baker. Tao, Mash, Silt, and Kina form a merry band of friends who go on a series of adventures.
Swirling around the lives of this small group are geopolitical tensions and perhaps a whiff of impending war.
The world here is one full of various creatures: hedge witches, mage hunters, and other magical creatures. The societies are pre-modern. People are defined by their work and skills, and their family relationships, and their wealth.
Tao conducts fast reads of the various towns they come upon, each with their own sense of character, townspeople, economies, geographies, and histories. Her quick reads enable her to break down the townspeople’s resistances against strangers in general and Shinn people in particular, to enable some level of mutuality. In some places, she is charged extra for being foreign. In some places, she is derided for her race, as Shinn. She is from Margrave, the Terraced City, and is clearly identified as city, perhaps, by the small townsfolk.
They meet up with various beings—a philosophical granite-like troll (who laments: “There Is No Point. Progress Is An Illusion. You Are Better Off Staying Very Still, Like Me”), a mage hunter, a recruiter for a team of thieves, and others. The tests that they face challenge them as individuals and as group members. There are life lessons along the way, about skill-building, learning, teamwork, ethics, and a core human ability to change and to be their best selves.
A reader is left with the sense that Tao’s power is not only her ability to See but to See as an outsider looking in.
In fantasy works, it is always challenging to see how much of the hidden true world is shown. For example, are there any religions that are real, or are all beliefs cultural creations? Where does magic come from? What is a just world in that context? What is good, and what is evil, in context? This novel stays firmly in the world of limited humanity with some limited power in a magical universe, without further explanations.
The Teller of Small Fortunes is woven from abstractions of religion writ-large, Chinese folklore, and sci-fi/fantasy. It is written with both a sense of innocence but also aspects of the harshness of the real world. The work is entertaining and charming, with a mix of adventure and hum. Leong is the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants. She grew up in New Jersey but also lived in Beijing, China, during some of her teen years. She works in finance in S.F.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
