A Conspiracy of Truths

A Conspiracy of Truths
Alexandra Rowland, 2018

Premise: A collector of stories is in prison, accused of witchcraft. What he tells his captors could not only determine his fate, but the fate of the nation.

I had seen some positive reviews for this book, so I picked it up when it was cheap. Unfortunately, it didn’t fully work for me.

It’s well written, and many of the stories that pepper the narrative are intriguing. The idea of a person dismantling a government by telling the right stories is cool, but despite his admitted role, Chant seems more swept along by events than anything else. The one huge thing he does has little to do with storytelling and more to do with networking. Alternate family structures and homosexual and bisexual characters are seen as normal, which was nice, but this didn’t really affect the plot, just added interesting flavor. The gimmick/twist that the first-person narrative is, in fact, being told to an actual character other than the reader is cute, but I felt it was introduced at a time that made the end of the plot too obvious.

It might have just been the wrong time for me to read this book. My reading time these days is extremely broken up, often at odd times of my sleep-deprived new-parent schedule. Maybe because of this, I never did learn to keep all the characters in this story straight, so a lot of the political maneuvering just read as fantasy name salad.

The narration was interesting enough to keep reading though, and the pace and characterizations really took on more life in the last quarter. I feel like there were many interesting things in this world that were only vaguely alluded to in this book.

3 Stars - A Good Book