Book Description

Middle-class Rosie Macalister has worked for years to fit in with her wealthy friends on the Yale equestrian team. But when she comes back from her junior year abroad with newfound confidence, she finds that the group has been infiltrated by a mysterious intruder: Annelise Tattinger.

A talented tarot reader and a brilliant rider, the enigmatic Annelise is unlike anyone Rosie has ever met. But when one of their friends notices money disappearing from her bank account, Annelise’s place in the circle is thrown into question. As the girls turn against each other, the group’s unspoken tensions and assumptions lead to devastating consequences.

It’s only after graduation, when Rosie begins a job at a Manhattan hedge fund, that she uncovers Annelise’s true identity––and how her place in their elite Yale set was no accident. Is it too late for Rosie to put right what went wrong, or does everyone’s luck run out at some point? Set in the heady days of the early aughts, The Fortune Seller is a haunting examination of class, ambition, and the desires that shape our lives.

My Review

This book is a delightfully twisty entry into the dark academia genre. At the risk of sounding dreadfully cliché, everyone is keeping secrets from each other, but it’s not until Rosie returns from study abroad that everything begins to unravel.

The pacing is perfect: taut at the tense moments, and then breezing over what the reader is supposed to perceive as unimportant. Narrator Rosie is fairly reliable; she’s both an outsider and a member of an inner circle. She knows her place is precarious, but she’s determined to make it work.

Admittedly, I began to harbor suspicions, and some of them proved to be correct. However, there were other things managed to shock me. I had no idea what was going to happen until the very end.

 I would have liked to have seen more of the Yale experience, but I think that’s part of the mystique: these EQ girls are set apart from the rest of their cohort—they are quite literally not like other girls. This dynamic makes Rosie beholden to the others; she doesn’t have anyone else to turn to.

I don’t know very much about tarot, but I loved how well it worked with the narrative on so many levels. I can’t say anything more, other than nothing is as what it appears and that the future isn’t always as clear as we might make it out to be.

I would absolutely recommend The Fortune Seller. I am going to be thinking about this book for a long time. It was very clever, and I’m going to have to re-read because I know there are little moments that I missed during my first readthrough. I want to the rest of Kapelke-Dale’s other books now!  

I received a digital ARC of this book from St. Martin’s/NetGalley