Book Review: The Cartomancer's Curse

Fun fact: "mancer" means divination. So a cartomancer uses cards to see the future, a pyromancer would see the future in flames,
​and a tyromancer will use cheese!

The Cartomancer's Curse by Kaitlin Schmidt is part of an indie series called Cards of Passion. It's technically book 7, but each novella stands alone and is written by a separate author. Full disclosure, I met Kaitlin at a writing conference, which is when I heard about the book, but I paid for the book and my opinions are my own.

Meridian is a tarot card reader, although her deck of cards isn't traditional, and her power extends to being able to psychically taste others' desires, from the mundane "I want to go home" vibes to the sexually explicit. To escape the flavor soup of city life, she has a secluded cabin, but when that is broken into, her sense of safety dissolves. Wren was hired to ransack Meridian's cabin, but immediately confesses when she realizes who Meridian is. When Meridian reads cards for Wren, hoping to gain insight into her mysterious desires, the reading goes awry and curses them both. They can only solve the problem together, but all that time spent tempts them to focus less on the curse and more on their desires.

I thought the magic system of the book was really cool. One thing writers always try to do is to involve all five senses. Sight is usually easiest and overused and taste is the hardest to incorporate, since it almost always requires eating, but you can't have characters eat in every scene. So tasting desires is a really cool mechanism to use an under-utilized sense, and the flavors chosen were both specific and unique without getting so exotic that I had to go to the grocery story to find some weird fruit. I also loved the queer-norm aspect of the book. For those not familiar, queer-norm is where a book includes queer relationships which are accepted and treated socially like hetero relationships have been treated in our world--there's no worry the parents won't accept it, no being targeted by hate groups or the government or whatever. It's the true embodiment of the phrase "love is love."

My age old novella complaint shines again: it was too fast. That's just me and novellas. I didn't feel like I spent enough time getting to know why the curse was happening before it was fixed.

This book is for you if you're looking for steamy sapphic romance, a cozy fantasy novella, or a unique magic system/taste-based magic system. I'm wondering if this would be a cool read for someone with synesthesia who tastes a lot of things that others would instead see/hear or a good read for someone who lost their sense of taste (perhaps in 2020?) and wants a book to bring back flavor memories. This book is not for you if you're looking for chaste romance, fantasy on the more epic or lengthy end of the spectrum, or if you dislike enemies to lovers.


Have you read The Cartomancer's Curse? What flavor was never assigned in the book and what do you think it would represent? Let's discuss in the comments!