The Stockholm Octavo by Karen Engelmannecco (HarperCollins), 2012

“Love and connection”: this is what one Mrs. Sofia Sparrow, gaming-parlor proprietress and cartomancer, prophesies for one of her customers, Emil Larsson. Having had a vision about his fate, Mrs. Sparrow says she’ll read his cards: she practices a Tarot-like form of divination using a spread of eight cards called the Octavo, in which each card represents a person who plays a particular role in relation to the seeker having his or her cards read. The seeker is then meant to figure out who those eight people are: using his or her knowledge of the people and the qualities of the role they’re cast in, the seeker can then, theoretically, influence the course of events.

But Larsson’s Octavo isn’t only about his own search: Mrs. Sparrow realizes his set of eight is connected to her own, and the event at the center of her Octavo is the protection of the Swedish monarchy (the book is set in Stockholm in the late 1790s, when fears of French-style revolution are worrying the nobility, who also fear that King Gustav III is undermining their power by giving more rights to commoners). The Stockholm Octavo is a blend of romance and political intrigue, and was sort of fun but also sort of too plot-driven for me (though there are some satisfying descriptive passages, and at times I found the book hard to put down because I was curious about what would happen next).