Kalyna The Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector
Format: Fiction
Genres and Categories: British Authors, Chronic Illness, Physical Disabilities, Clairvoyant Characters, Diverse Representation, Magic Users, Outlaw Characters, Epic Fantasy, Queer Characters, Spycraft, Thriller
Series: Failures of Four Kingdoms #1
My Rating:
Published on: 26th March 2024
Pages: 496
Disability Representation: Dementia, Missing Limb
Buy this Book! Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Blackwells / Bookshop.org US
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A fantastical game of political intrigue played by a fraud, where the grumpy snark of K. S. Villoso’s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro meets a rich Eastern European–inflected world akin to Ava Reid’s The Wolf and the Woodsman.

A plucky, sardonic con artist must “prophesize” her way out of peril— discovering along the way that the keys to power and politics are nothing more than the stories that we can sell as truth.

Kalyna’s family has the Gift: the ability to see the future. For generations, they traveled the four kingdoms of the Tetrarchia selling their services as soothsayers. Every child of their family is born with this Gift—everyone except Kalyna.

So far, Kalyna has used informants and trickery to falsify prophecies for coin, scrounging together a living for her deteriorating father and cruel grandmother. But Kalyna’s reputation for prophecy precedes her, and poverty turns to danger when she is pressed into service by the spymaster to Rotfelsen.

Kalyna is to use her “Gift” to uncover threats against Rotfelsen’s king, her family held hostage to ensure her good behavior. But 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 uncovers points to a larger threat, not only to Rotfelsen but to the Tetrarchia itself.

Kalyna is determined to protect her family and newfound friends, but as she is drawn deeper into palace intrigue, she can no longer tell if her manipulations are helping prevent the Tetrarchia’s destruction—or if her lies will bring about its prophesized downfall.

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

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I have to admit I went into Kalyna the Soothsayer expecting there to be a point where the main character, Kalyna, was revealed to have real soothsaying powers or some other gift. At some points, it felt as though that was where Spector was heading, and I thought I read a few hints dropped to that extent. I’m not quite sure if I’m glad that I was wrong about the direction Spector took the book in or not, because while I think that route would have been interesting, it was also refreshing to have a protagonist who didn’t have any powers. As a result, Kalyna the Soothsayer is more fantasy with a spy and thriller twist than your usual epic fantasy, and I think that is what kept me hooked. I had to know what was going to happen, how things would turn out.

As a main character, Kalyna is probably not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Anyone who read Throne of Glass and complained that Celaena was bratty should give this a miss, especially because they missed the fact that Celaena had been through traumatic experiences and was dealing with PTSD. The world of Kalyna the Soothsayer is divided into four kingdoms, which eventually banded together to form a “gigantic country” called the Tetrarchia. Kalyna and her family are travelling soothsayers, and as she tells people multiple times throughout the book, she’s not “foreign”; she belongs to every country.

“I have got something from everywhere, and I am exotic to all” is how she explains, “It is useful for business, and also for being dragged out by a mob to be throttled”.

Her grandmother is an extremely toxic person who told her as a child that she killed her mother (she died in childbirth), and has been emotionally abusing her since it became obvious that Kalyna had not inherited their family gift. Being forced into a coach and taken to one of the kingdoms to act as a soothsayer in a prince’s mad scheme is just another traumatic event in a long line for this young woman. Spector does a great job of walking that fine line between exploring Kalyna’s feelings of imprisonment, anxiety of being found out as a fraud, worry about her disabled father, while feeling guilty for enjoying luxuries that she has never had before.

I found her likeable and relatable, and a lot of that was to do with Spector’s narrative voice. At one point during Kalyna the Soothsayer, a character, introduces herself while eating something, and Kalyna is too embarrassed to ask her to repeat it because she likes her. She spends an awfully long time calling this woman a random misheard name until someone finally says her name properly, and it was just so relatable. It also brought the whole situation and the character down to earth. She’s running around trying not to get caught, up to her neck in the middle of political conspiracies, risking certain death, and there she is worried about embarrassing herself in front of a pretty girl!

While there was enough to keep me hooked, the massive downfall of the Kalyna the Soothsayer is its length. There is just so much waffling on which just isn’t needed. I don’t know whether a map is included in the final edition (there’s no preview available on Amazon and no information on the author’s website), but this is one of those books where one is sorely needed. From the way the kingdoms are described and the etymology of the names Spector has used, I would guess that this is one of those fantasy worlds stylised on real-world locations and cultures. Sometimes that can be done very well, and sometimes it can feel like I’m reading historical fiction rather than fantasy. In this case, it wasn’t done well. When Kalyna is reading through her captor’s tireless and boring notes, the reader does not need to know all those details as well, for example.

Some things were well done, and it was good to see a disabled character and lots of LGBT representation in a fantasy novel without any negative connotations attached to either. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for what Elijah Kinch Spector does next, but Kalyna the Soothsayer just wasn’t quite the right fit for me.

About Elijah Kinch Spector

Elijah Kinch Spector is a novelist and dandy raised in the Bay Area counterculture who now lives in Brooklyn. He is a British Fantasy Award finalist whose writing has received acclaim from NPR, Reactor, Nerds of a Feather, Foreword, and Paste Magazine, among others.

Website | Goodreads | Instagram | Blue Sky

Thank you for reading my review for Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector! It is currently available for pre-order from any of the links in this review and is due out for release on August 9th 2022.

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