Katie True is simply moving her life from one dead-end job to the next after losing the one job she’s ever truly enjoyed; reading tarot at a cafe. With solid intuition and sarcasm, she does her absolute best to keep herself afloat, even if that’s just working at a Russian import store and befriending a woman named Marley who works at the store right across from here. Though they become fast friends, Marley is short with her answers and keeps most of her life close to the chest. When a man stumbles into her store one day, acting extremely weird, she offers to read his tarot cards. In an attempt to get a feel for him, she sneaks a peak at his phone and discovers a photo of Marley, with a gunshot wound to the head. Katie puts her instincts to the test and starts to stalk the man with the photo. She soon discovers there is far more to Marley than she ever thought, and it might be putting her life in danger.
Lina Chern’s Play the Fool uses tarot references to help the characters come to life. For those who have only a passing knowledge of tarot, this can be fun an interesting. Katie is an interesting character, but there were multiple times in this book where all I could think was “please make better choices, girl.” The mystery in the book is enjoyable, but at times feels longer than necessary and sometimes falls back in on itself. Truth be told, I’d rather have had an entire book with Marley as the main character than Katie. Still, Play the Fool is an enjoyable read.
Play the Fool is available March 28th.
