A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland

[lightreads]

A Conspiracy of Truths

3/5. Traveling storyteller is arrested for spying and witchcraft; accidentally is witness to/causes the downfall of the kingdom from within various prison cells.

So I only know about Alexandra Rowland because I discovered I like the Be the Serpent podcast, and I only discovered Be the Serpent because they had the staggering good taste to feature something I wrote as one of their discussion tentpoles, and I only know about that because someone slid into my dm's to tell me. So now I read Rowland's book because that's how the internet go, baby.

Anyway, this is fun, though it does not entirely overcome the inbuilt structural problems of locking your protagonist in a series of boxes and having various people tell him what's going on outside. There is some nice character work here – the narrator is that mix of charming and unlikeable that means he's a real person. But I am just not the target audience for the sort of book which is structured to be punctuated by various people telling each other plot or theme relevant folktales. If that's your jam, here is your jam, but eh, not mine.

I am the target audience for an extremely cranky lawyer/client relationship, though, which this book delivers on in spades.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

I keep expecting this to be a lot more unreliable than it was, waiting for what it had up its sleeve, which was distracting.

[lightreads]

Yes! I had a distinct sense of that's it? as it wound down. And in general I kept waiting to be lied to, or at least lied to better.

[kate_nepveu]

I like city-level stuff about societal change! I just have expectations--not unreasonable ones, I don't think--when a format like that pops up.

[readerjane]

Ooh - thanks for the podcast rec. That sounds like something I would like very much.