Review of Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector
Elijah Kinch Spector’s Kalyna the Soothsayer (Erewhon Books, 2022), is a sweeping secondary world fantasy novel featuring high stakes, political intrigue, and loads of deception.
Kalyna’s father and grandmother both had the Gift, the ability to see the future of people with whom they are not close. However, Kalyna was born without it, a fact her grandmother has never let her forget. Still, she makes her living as a soothsayer, using her abilities to read people and situations to give them vague enough prophecies to keep them happy (and money in her pocket). This changes when she’s abducted by the spymaster, Lenz, who works for the Prince of one of the four nations that makes up the Tetrarchia–the very same Tetrarchia of which Kalyna’s father has just seen the downfall.
While this novel has an enormous cast of characters and a huge plot, the more prominent characters are generally very well developed and characterized, making it easy to tell them apart from one another. Like many fantasy novels, some of the names are unwieldy and potentially hard to pronounce, but it remains very readable in spite of this. I was a little disappointed that one of my favorite characters died, seemingly to inspire Kalyna to continue with her plots, but this is a minor complaint. There was also something of a dangling end left in the concluding chapters of the book, but knowing that Spector has a second book in this series coming (due out in November 2024), I hope that plot thread will be sewn up in the sequel.
This book also features fantastic worldbuilding with some historical real-world inspiration, which made it right up my alley. If you also love epic secondary world fantasy with large casts of characters and world-shattering stakes, check out Kalyna the Soothsayer!
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