An Insomnia Cure: Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector

Posted 23rd July 2022 by Sia in Fantasy Reviews, Queer Lit, Reviews / 0 Comments

Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector
Genres: Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bisexual MC, disabled secondary character, secondary M/M
PoV: First-person, past-tense
Published on: 9th August 2022
ISBN: B09HK15F26
Goodreads
two-half-stars

Kalyna’s family has had the Gift for generations: the ability to see and predict the future. For decades, they have traveled around the four connected kingdoms of the Tetrarchia—one country with four monarchs—selling their services as soothsayers. The Gift is their calling and what defines them. Every child of their family has the Gift.

Except Kalyna. Born without the Gift, for years, she’s supported her father—who is losing sight of reality under the weight of his confused visions of the future—and her cruel grandmother on the strength of her wits, using informants and trickery to fake prophecies and scrounge a living. But it’s getting harder every year.

And poverty turns to danger when, on the strength of her reputation, Kalyna is “hired” (kidnapped, she would call it) by Lenz, the spymaster to the prince of Rotfelsen. Lenz wants Kalyna to use her talent for prophecy to uncover threats against Rotfelsen’s king, and he’s willing to hold her family hostage against her good behavior. But Rotfelsenisch politics are devious; the King’s enemies abound; and Kalyna’s skills for investigation and deception are tested to the limit. Worse, the conspiracy she begins to uncover points to a threat not only to the King of Rotfelsen but to all four monarchs of the Tetrarchia, when they meet for their annual governing “Council of Barbarians.” A Council that happens to fall at precisely the same time that Kalyna’s father has prophesied the catastrophic downfall of the Tetrarchia.

Kalyna is determined to protect her family (even Grandmother!), and her newfound friends—and to save the Tetrarchia too. But as she is drawn deeper into palace intrigue, she’s not sure if her manipulations are helping prevent the Tetrarchia’s destruction—or if her lies will bring it about.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~a seer who can’t See
~a literally underground nation
~one seriously awful grandmother
~a very distressing eye

Thank the gods that’s over!

I am not kidding: after a pretty solid start, Soothsayer rapidly became my ‘knockout’ read – the book I read to cure my insomnia. It worked excellently, and even when it didn’t put me to sleep, it made me put my ereader away and close my eyes just to escape it.

It’s not that Soothsayer is an actively bad book, like, say, Silk Fire. Spector knows how to put sentences together, has a pretty engaging protagonist, and does not shove excess worldbuilding down our throats.

But it’s so freaking heavy. 464 pages felt like twice that, and for the majority of them I was bored out of my mind.

Which I will grant is odd, because Soothsayer isn’t packed full of long stretches of nothing. Something was always happening. It’s just that they tended to be meandering things, or pretty plot-irrelevant things, or things that went in circles. And I fundamentally just didn’t care about any of it. Something about this book never clicked for me, leaving me passively watching instead of actively engaged in the story.

I really, really just wanted it to be over.

I think a huge part of this was due to the setting. The Tetrarchia – four kingdoms pretending to be one – really made no sense, and Spector didn’t try to justify it – I loved Kalyna’s disgust and ambivalence about royals and nobles and the rich, but her shrugging at the stupidity of her ‘betters’ wasn’t really enough for me. I tried to think of it as being like US states calling themselves one country, but the cultures Kalyna described were so wildly different they made Texas and New York look indistinguishable. I just didn’t buy it.

But even if I accepted the Tetrarchia, I actively resented the majority of the book being set in Rotfelsen. Rotfelsen should have been incredibly weird and interesting – it’s a country that exists almost entirely underground! But Kalyna is stuck on the surface for most of the book, because that’s where all the important people live.

…Why on Earth would you create a setting as cool as an underground nation – and then barely let your protagonist into it?! We get occasional mention/speculation of giant monsters that first carved out the tunnels that later turned into Rotfelsen – which, again, so cool – but that was another detail that went nowhere, shared as historical trivia rather than leading to a reveal that these monsters are still around, or something. And the glimpses we did get of the proper underground Rotfelsen were minimal, with very little visual description and no real worldbuilding – it’s just handwaved that people live down there pretending like everything’s aboveground, rather than going into the myriad ways a culture would have to adapt to, and be shaped by, living underground.

I wanted to tear my hair out over it.

And then the other kingdoms of the Tetrarchia sounded so much more interesting that I spent the rest of the book wishing the story had been set in one of them instead.

I love political intrigue fantasy, but this just dragged on and on with minimal progress made. It wasn’t interesting to read. The factions involved seemed hugely simplistic and stupid – there are literally four armies described by their uniform colours; the Reds, Yellows, Greens, and Purples, all of whom owe allegiance to a different part of the royal court. The prince who ordered Kalyna’s kidnapping is an idiot – this is acknowledged by Kalyna and everyone around her, but it was frustrating to read, not entertaining. Everything just became more and more convoluted, not in a political-spiderweb way, but in a ‘this is ridiculous’ way, and having your main character acknowledge or call it out as ridiculous doesn’t change the reading experience.

I liked that the big bads were driven by toxic nationalism and xenophobia – more acknowledgement that these things are terrible, please – but really hated that, after so much investigation and politcking, we were told the villains’ plan, a summary of the conversation Kalyna had, rather than getting the conversation itself. And the Surprise Thing behind the visions of Rotfelsen physically falling and crumbling? …Yeah, no. You don’t get to drop something that huge in at the last second and then do nothing with it.

I reiterate: it’s not a terrible book. Kalyna was a great protagonist – I loved how brutally honest she was with herself, and how ruthless in protecting herself and her family – and the worldbuilding around languages in particular was pretty excellent. But I did not enjoy reading this, and was so, so relieved when it was finally over.

I literally had to take a nap afterwards, I was so exhausted by it.

Don’t judge this one by its cover, folx.

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