Cozy fantasy is still having A Moment right now, but even amidst the sea of soft-edged stories spawned by the likes of Legends & Lattes, The Teller of Small Fortunes is a true standout. It strikes that delicate balance of being warm and fuzzy without becoming boring or overly saccharine, it weaves in relevant social themes (particularly about immigrant experiences) without becoming bleak, and--so refreshing in the deluge of recent romantasies--the main character has no romance at all.

The best way I can describe this book is a story of identity, fighting prejudice, and found family, wrapped in a charming, genre-savvy D&D campaign. Leong clearly has a strong grasp of what makes cozy fantasy work, along with the fantasy genre more broadly, and she puts that knowledge to great use. Despite its short length, the book's characters are all well-rounded, each with their own fortes and foibles that are put on full display as they traipse through an array of side quests. There are hallmarks of classic fantasy, but always with a twist--a phoenix who is also a fierce mother, a bridge troll who has grown full of existential dread (one of my favorite scenes was the troll confrontation!), and so on.

There are also all the things cozy fantasy readers adore: lovingly described pastries, endearing animal companions (Chinese speakers will find a fun Easter egg in one of the animals' names), bright and clever prose, and charming nights of fireside banter between a ragtag team of misfits. And then there are the important conversations: the challenges of forced assimilation into a new culture and fear of losing your identity in the process (so much love for how this book dealt specifically with the topic of loss of language and community), the disconnect between parents' aspirations and those of their children, and of course, the necessity of finding meaning and connection in a complicated world. Bonus points for the story making it very clear--through an aroace-coded main character--that finding family, or love, or meaning, does not mean you have to fall in romantic love; it simply means finding people who love and accept you as you are.

Tl;dr this was charming and quirky and everything I hoped it would be. It had been a hot minute since I'd read a true "warm hug" of a book, but this restored my faith that such stories still exist 💜

The hero of Julie Leong’s debut novel, The Teller of Small Fortunes, knows better than to tell big fortunes, the kind of fortunes that shape destinies. Tao travels through the kingdom of Eshtara, lingering only a few days in each village. It’s a lonely life, but a safe one: If a village seems hostile to Shinn immigrants or magic-users, she can pack up her wagon and move on. She’s happy—kind of—with her itinerant existence.

But everything changes when two strangers on the road help her move a branch that’s blocking her wagon’s path. Tao tells a small fortune for Mast, that he’ll give his daughter a kitten soon. It turns out that Mast and Silt are on the road searching for that very daughter, who was kidnapped by raiders, and the trail has gone cold. Their hopes renewed, the two of them decide to travel along with Tao for a while. They acquire a cat. They meet a baker with unusual ideas. Suddenly, Tao has friends, travel companions, perhaps even—for the first time since she fled her home and her stepfather’s stifling expectations—something like family.

If romance novels feel like the author is looking you dead in the eyes while handing you a slice of your favorite cake (there’s only one bed; it’s a marriage of convenience; she’s a storm cloud and he is a sunshine), friendship novels are perhaps not trying to smash your dopamine receptors with quite the same force. But there’s a similarly iterative pleasure to watching a lonely character getting dragged willy-nilly into community. As soon as it’s established that Mast has a daughter, and the daughter is missing, you know that Tao’s in it with him for the long haul. Mast can hit people and Silt can steal things, so you know they will be hitting people and stealing things on Tao’s behalf, and you know she’s going to be overwhelmed by the new experience of being cared for by other people.

The pleasure of iteration lies in the different ways the author sticks with your expectations or spikes them, and Leong does plenty of both. On the one hand, yes, Mast punches some people for Tao, and Silt steals things for her; I was right to expect that. When trouble comes, for the first time since Tao’s early childhood, she doesn’t have to face it alone.

On the other hand, the road to being in community isn’t without its bumps. When baker Kina joins the group, Silt starts making eyes at her. I sighed wearily, not being much in the mood for a by-the-numbers background romance. Instead, Kina takes some time to think it over, then dresses Silt down for hitting on her just because she’s there. It rules. I love it when characters scold other characters for things the narrative has shown us but hasn’t quite named yet. Besides not feeling like Silt is genuinely into her, Kina doesn’t want to date him because she doesn’t think he’s genuine at all:

“You’re a macaron… They’re wonderful to eat, but you can’t make a meal of them, for they’ve no substance.”

“You think I’ve… no substance?” said Silt. He sounded bewildered and hurt…

“You’re all charm and flattery and coin tricks, Silt! You’re a great deal of fun to be around, but I have no idea what’s underneath it all.”

As defensive as Silt feels in the moment—he does the thing of trying to rally Tao and Mast to his cause, which I found so relatable—he ends up truly taking Kina’s feedback to heart. Silt begins to think more deeply about what makes a person of substance, and he tries to choose the way that kind of person would choose—which in turn opens the door to greater intimacy with the other members of this burgeoning family. Like community, character doesn’t just happen. We choose, and choose, and choose to build those things, and all our choices together with the choices of the people around us make a life.

SFF is at a fascinating point in its relationship to cozy (slash comforting, slash low-stakes) fiction. In these troubled times, many readers are starved for SFF novels whose stakes aren’t in the “save the world” tier; books whose protagonists don’t hold the fate of nations in their hands; books that reassure rather than unsettling; books where people are basically good and communities support each other and everything turns out okay. Julie Leong wrote The Teller of Small Fortunes to meet exactly this craving, as Ace’s publicity materials note: “Sitting at her father’s hospital bedside, Leong read any book she could find that was magical, comforting, and heartfelt. When she began to run out of cozy fantasies to read, she thought: Why not try writing one myself?”

Yet alongside this craving for comfort exists an equally powerful suspicion of that craving, and of the fiction that attempts to sate it. What rough edges are being smoothed over to give us that feeling of comfort? What have we readers done to deserve comfort in the first place? Does coziness require an abandonment of critical thought, temporary or long-lasting? If this world is a utopia, who has been left behind by it? Isn’t it the task of speculative fiction to confront and challenge us, and has not the author abrogated their responsibility by prioritizing warmth and coziness instead?

I’m not making fun of those questions. They’re big, important questions. But I also want to make the case that confrontation is by far the easier task. It’s no great feat of imagination to dream up a corrupt system. The system is easily imagined breakable because systems are easily broken. To imagine a system unbroken is to hold in your mind something impossibly vast; it is to consider every possible breaking point and strengthen it. And comfort requires good systems, I think. I am comforted by grilled cheese sandwiches and reliable nonfiction, which requires systems for food regulation and peer review.

If a writer is interested in comforting her readers, then, she can write her characters into unflawed systems; or allow them to exist within systems she and they acknowledge as imperfect; or opt her characters out of such systems altogether. At the start of The Teller of Small Fortunes, Tao has chosen the third path. She sticks to smallish towns where she won’t come to the attention of the regulatory body for magic-users. She doesn’t stay long enough to risk negative responses to what she can do. And if she encounters racist prejudice, she simply moves on. (It’s worth noting, though, that even this set of choices bespeaks the existence of political decisions that enable her to travel freely between villages.)

Only, it doesn’t work. It can’t. We are, as the poet says, each other’s business. When Tao makes the choice to be in community with Mast and Silt, she cracks open a door to being in community with more people, and more, and more, and then she’s caught up in the various systems and societies she had tried to exempt herself from. If we are going to be people in the world, we’re stuck being people with each other.

The Teller of Small Fortunes presents us with systems and people that are generally good—the world as we’d like it to be. Tao’s journey throughout this book is to learn that the people and institutions she has feared, the bogeymen of her childhood and her life as a traveling fortune-teller, are not as terrible as she thought. This will hit different readers differently, I suppose, but I found it comforting. The current real world is uglier and crueler than I hoped its inhabitants would choose to make it, and I found a true respite in spending some time in a world where the opposite is true. The Teller of Small Fortunes is sweet and silly and warm. If Leong’s goal was to offer heartfelt comfort to her readers, she’s achieved it in spades.

This was nice and cozy and I enjoyed all the characters. The plot was a bit slow and it didn't hold my interest as much as I would have liked. I needed a little more adventure to keep it interesting.

Thank you NetGalley and Berkley for the e-arc!
I ended up loving this way more than I thought I would. I went in expecting a cozy fantasy, something easy and relaxing, and boy did I get that and more. The story ended up being much more engaging and engrossing than I expected! i couldn't put this book down, especially when I learned the mc is meant to be ace.
This book has a calm and subtle profoundness that reads exceedingly well and is just the perfect book for some quiet and beautiful reading time.

What a cozy little adventure this book turned out to be. If you enjoy a fun quest where the stakes aren't exceedingly high, this book is for you.

This was such a warm and wonderful book. I loved the cozy vibe and the travelling found-family group so much! The characters were all so fun and well-written, and they all had great character development throughout the story. The plot was quite fast-paced, and I really enjoyed it! I'll read anything else that Julie Leong writes :) Overall, I would completely recommend this book; I think it will end up as one of my favourite reads of the year!

DNF @ 10%

Unfortunately, this book just wasn't for me. I think the idea and premise is interesting, but I'm starting to think that perhaps either cozy fantasies are just not for me, or the ones being published currently are missing something for me that I can't quite put my finger on.

Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes is a breathtakingly beautiful novel that weaves magic, mystery, and human connection into an unforgettable story. With lush, evocative prose and a mesmerizing narrative, Leong masterfully crafts a tale that feels both intimate and grand, transporting readers into a world where every small fortune carries profound meaning.
The novel’s protagonist is compelling, a deeply layered character whose journey through love, loss, and self-discovery is as poignant as it is enchanting. The storytelling is rich with emotion, and Leong’s ability to capture the quiet, transformative moments of life is nothing short of remarkable. The world she creates is immersive, filled with vivid details that bring each scene to life, making it easy to get lost in its beauty.
The Teller of Small Fortunes is a novel that lingers long after the last page, a testament to the power of storytelling and the delicate threads that connect us all. Julie Leong has crafted a masterpiece—one that is both deeply moving and utterly magical. A must-read for those who appreciate lyrical, thought-provoking fiction.

I really enjoyed this quaint story. It is a low stakes cozy fantasy with loveable characters, and fun little quests.

I absolutely loved the writing style of this one, and it was truly a comfort to read! Julie's worldbuilding is really fun as well. The characters are charming and the found family vibes are perfect. I can't wait to read more from Julie!

I enjoyed spending time with these characters in this fantasy land. The story had just enough tension and plot to keep going at a good pace while still remaining super cozy.

This book did not do it for me. I'm 90% sure I didn't even finish it even though I was very worried about the lost little girl. The characters were lovely, but ultimately the novel had too many weird plot points that felt like a DnD campaign got shoved in the middle of the novel. It also felt like the publisher or author was like "can you please just write something like Legends & Lattes?" And oh boy do they recreate it. Pretending that this universe creates the exact same fortune cookie and called it a fortune cookie? So dumb.

A warm, beautiful, and ultimately comforting fantasy

I loved THE TELLER OF SMALL FORTUNES, Julie Leong’s debut novel. It’s a cozy quest fantasy with a found-family vibe, set in a vaguely British renaissance-era world. Tao, the main character, travels the land in a wagon, telling “small fortunes” and avoiding her ability to see major events in her clients’ lives. She is solitary, except for her mule Laohu, and she prefers it that way. When she accidentally reads a not-so-small fortune for a former mercenary seeking his lost daughter, Tao finds herself caught up in his quest, and reluctantly agrees to travel with Mash and his companion Silt, a former thief. Along the way, the trio are joined by a baker, Kina, as well as a cat. Slowly, Tao begins to trust her companions. But Tao’s use of her gift eventually attracts the notice of agents of the mage guild (from whom she has been hiding for years), putting not only Tao but her new friends in danger.

THE TELLER OF SMALL FORTUNES really is cozy fantasy, despite the dangers Tao and her friends find themselves in. The three major side characters are delightful and individual, and their several adventures serve to meld them together as a team. In fact, the novel feels very much like a D&D-style adventure—on a personal rather than an epic scale, and low on both violence and evil creatures. The party does encounter a few potentially dangerous magical beings, dealing with them ethically and creatively. I also appreciated how the villains turned out to be worse in Tao’s imagination than in reality. And as you might expect from a cozy fantasy, the descriptions of Kina’s treats had me longing for scones, cinnamon rolls, and other tasty baked treats.

The author, Julie Leong, draws on her own experiences in exploring themes of racial identity and belonging through the character of Tao. Born in Shinara, Tao has not seen her homeland since her childhood; following her father’s death, her mother married a Eshteran minor nobleman and they left Shinara for his land. Marked as foreign by her appearance, Tao faces suspicion and occasional prejudice in the villages and small towns to which she confines her travels. She feels she can never truly fit in in Eshtera, but nor can she go back to Shinara. Resolving that conflict is a major facet of Tao’s character arc. In fact, the meaning of home, family, and belonging are key to all the major characters’ journeys.

THE TELLER OF SMALL FORTUNES is a warm, beautiful, and ultimately comforting debut fantasy. I would love to see more books set in this world, especially featuring these characters. But regardless of the setting, I look forward to seeing whatever Julie Leong does next.

I stopped reading this at 15% because it wasn't holding my attention and the characters were unlikable to me.

☕️🫖𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑻𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒓 𝒐𝒇 𝑺𝒎𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝑭𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒖𝒏𝒆𝒔🫖🍵

‘𝒲ℯ 𝒸𝒶𝓃 𝒷ℯ 𝓃ℴ𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒸𝒽ℴℴ𝓈ℯ 𝓉ℴ 𝒷ℯ 𝓂𝒾𝓈ℯ𝓇𝒶𝒷𝓁ℯ 𝒶𝒷ℴ𝓊𝓉 𝒾𝓉, 𝓁𝒾𝓀ℯ 𝓎ℴ𝓊—ℴ𝓇 𝓌ℯ 𝒸𝒶𝓃 𝒷ℯ 𝓃ℴ𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔, 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝒸𝒽ℴℴ𝓈ℯ 𝓉ℴ 𝒷ℯ 𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓅𝓎, 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓁ℯ𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝒷ℯ 𝓅𝓊𝓇𝓅ℴ𝓈ℯ ℯ𝓃ℴ𝓊𝑔𝒽. 𝒲𝒽𝒾𝒸𝒽 𝓈ℴ𝓊𝓃𝒹𝓈 𝓂ℴ𝓇ℯ 𝓌ℴ𝓇𝓉𝒽𝓌𝒽𝒾𝓁ℯ 𝓉ℴ 𝓎ℴ𝓊?’

‘A wandering fortune teller finds an unexpected family in this warm and wonderful debut fantasy, perfect for readers of Travis Baldree and Sangu Mandanna.’

🫖Cozy tale of friendship, growth, and redemption
🫖Warm and whimsical
🫖Found Family
🫖Choosing your own path
🫖Light, easy read

For fans of Legends and Lattes and The House on the Cerulean Sea! I loved it! It was the perfect light fantasy read I was looking for as a palate cleanser, sometimes you just need a wholesome book!

The writing was exquisite for a debut novel which comes to no surprise as author Julie Leong is a Yale graduate in economics and political science🤓 I can’t wait to see what other books she goes on to publish!

Also peep this gorgeous @fairyloot edition🤩

Synopsis:
‘Tao is an immigrant fortune teller, traveling between villages with just her trusty mule for company. She only tells “small” fortunes: whether it will hail next week; which boy the barmaid will kiss; when the cow will calve. She knows from bitter experience that big fortunes come with big consequences…

Even if it’s a lonely life, it’s better than the one she left behind. But a small fortune unexpectedly becomes something more when a (semi) reformed thief and an ex-mercenary recruit her into their desperate search for a lost child. Soon, they’re joined by a baker with a “knead” for adventure, and—of course—a slightly magical cat.

Tao starts down a new path with companions as big-hearted as her fortunes are small. But as she lowers her walls, the shadows of her past close in—and she’ll have to decide whether to risk everything to preserve the family she never thought she could have.’

My cozy fantasy readers, which books in this genre are some of your favorites?!

I love the idea of “small” fortunes!

I needed a cozy fantasy for the perilous times we’re in. This was cute and sweet, but failed to grab me. I could not focus on the story because it was almost too cozy. Now, certainly could have been a fault of other things happening in the world right now, but I did want a like more.

I do think if you’re a lover of cozy fantasies, however, that this will be right up your alley.

Cozy fantasy is an interesting subgenre. I have liked a few from those that I have read, but this one just felt like there wasn't much to the plot. For this reason I found it hard to concentrate while reading and found myself just not wanting to pick it up. I was hoping this would be a winner because the cover is beautiful and I am happy that cozy fantasy is becoming popular. Sometimes you just want something on the lighter side.

Overall, this wasn't for me.

This book crafts a story as captivating as it is quietly profound. At its center is Tao, a gifted female fortune teller who can see fragments of her clients’ futures. Through her, we meet a kaleidoscope of people, each desperate for answers, healing, or clarity. But Tao, despite her extraordinary gift, carries deep wounds of her own—a tragic past and an aching desire to reconcile with the family she’s lost.

Leong’s prose is spellbinding, weaving vivid imagery with gentle yet razor-sharp emotional insight. You don’t just read about Tao’s world—you feel it. The tension in her every interaction, the bittersweet weight of her visions, and the intricate emotional threads connecting each character resonate deeply. This isn’t a book of grand twists or fast-paced action; instead, it’s a study of the intimate moments that shape lives and the delicate, often unseen ties between strangers.

What truly sets this novel apart is its exploration of connection and vulnerability. Tao’s fortune-telling isn’t merely a skill—it’s a window into the human condition. Through her eyes, we see how people’s hopes, fears, and choices intersect, creating ripples that extend beyond themselves. And yet, the most poignant part of Tao’s story lies in her struggle to see her own future clearly—a reminder that even those who guide others can be adrift in their own journeys. This is a book for readers who savor introspective, character-driven narratives. Leong’s ability to capture raw, relatable truths about love, loss, and destiny makes this one a beautifully meditative read.

A wonderfully, warm and cozy adventure. If you need a book to lift your spirits, this is just the ticket.

I have been extending my reading from cozy mystery to cozy fiction in general. I am especially enjoying cozy fantasy and The Teller of Small Fortunes fits the bill. Author Julie Leong tells the story Tao, a young woman on her own, traveling the country in a mule-drawn wagon, Tao earns her living by telling fortunes, but only small ones. Tao fears that using her greater vision will bring her to the attention of the Mage's Guild. One day Tao meets a pair of adventurers. She tells the fortune of one and, even though it is small, her vision reveals something remarkable. Before Tao knows how it happens, she finds herself travelling with the men and a young woman, a baker, who longs to see the world. At first Tao isn't sure she wants their company. She's used to being on her own. But as the group get to know each other, friendships are forged, obstacles are faced and problems are solved. The bonds between Tao and her new companions grow stronger until Tao is willing to risk everything, including her freedom, to help them. This is a heartwarming story of bonds forged and broken ties mended. Readers will be filled with warm fuzzy feelings by the end of the story.