On the highest rooftop in the Dregs, close enough to the city wall to feel its cold, a pickpocket named Mara pulls back a ragged cloth to show a wheel painted on the stone. The temple down on Fish Street has closed, so this is where she prays now. She pricks her ex-girlfriend’s finger, presses the blood to two worn coins that nobody mints anymore, one stamped with a wheel and one with the phases of the moon, and asks the gods to protect her. Kestrel waits for a sign. There is none, and she says so, a little embarrassed for them both. The Tarot Trials by Katee Robert begins with a prayer that seems to go unheard, and the rest of the novel is an argument about whether anyone was listening.
The contest Kestrel is about to enter is a battle royale dressed as religion: twenty-two champions of the old gods, five survivors, and a seat in government for each of them. She will stand for the Moon, the god her late mother served and the one the rest of the city will not go near. The novel is out now from Tor, and it opens a planned trilogy.
Faith in a City That Has Stopped Believing
The book’s most striking idea is that the gods are being quietly starved. The aristocratic courts on the hill worship the four elements, and over a generation they have bought up the old temples one by one as their priests died without successors. Kestrel’s own temple is kept by a single elderly woman with no name, the last of her order, who explains how children were once taken in and fed by the temples until a scandal and a new law ended it. She speaks of the courts with a bitterness her calm manner cannot hide.
Against that backdrop, The Tarot Trials by Katee Robert plays fair with the supernatural. Kestrel arrives a sceptic, sure that the gods exist but have never cared about the poor, and the novel lets her be half right. When a voice that is not hers starts speaking inside her head, the question shifts from whether the gods are real to what they want from her, and that is a far more interesting question to carry into a sequel.
Hunger at the Banquet Table
Robert is angriest, and best, on the subject of food. At the first feast on the champions’ island, Kestrel cannot make herself fill a plate like the others. She darts in, grabs a loaf and a slab of beef, and backs away expecting to be chased, and a former champion laughs at her. Later she stares at gemstones lying at the bottom of a street fountain as holy offerings, enough to feed her neighbours for months, and at a breakfast of fresh fruit she cannot get used to. The grievance never becomes a lecture, because it is so physical. Readers feel the cramp in her stomach before they hear the argument, and The Tarot Trials by Katee Robert never lets the comfort of the hill look innocent.
The afternoon events, which the courts host for their own amusement, are where the danger is subtlest. One dinner seats Kestrel between two allied women who smile and make conversation while one of them turns her plate, for a moment, into rotting fruit crawling with maggots. A troupe from the sex workers’ guild then dances the founding of the city wall, the gods cutting down monsters until only stone remains. The scene is beautiful and slightly obscene, the powerful applauding a myth about protection while the protected starve below them.
Dancing With the Man Who Killed Her Mother
The finest relationship in the novel is not a romance. Death, the champion who executed Kestrel’s mother twenty-two years earlier, is competing again, and the moment she corners him on a dance floor he refuses to behave like the monster she has rehearsed hating. He trades one answer for one question. He tells her something about her mother’s origins that her own guardian never knew. Readers will guess that there is more to him well before Kestrel does, but Robert handles the slow thaw with restraint. In The Tarot Trials by Katee Robert, every scene between them carries a charge the love story struggles to match.
That love story belongs to the Tower, a scarred outsider from a river settlement beyond the walls, who is allied with Death and speaks with an unnerving bluntness. Their dances crackle. The trouble is pacing. The attraction simmers for most of the book, then accelerates through a handful of chapters into one explicit scene near the end, and the turn feels hurried rather than inevitable. Readers who know Robert from their spicier work should know the heat here is a single late burst.
What the Tarot Trials Hold Back
Other reservations are less dramatic but harder to ignore:
- Exposition often arrives as a briefing. Vote counts, court rivalries and history are explained across tables and in carriages, usually by the nobly born ally who knows everything.
- The lore is rationed. The wall, the caged power of the gods and the truth of the last Moon’s crime are teased in cryptic dialogue and mostly held for later volumes.
- Some of the cast stay thin. Several rival champions exist mainly to be eliminated, and their deaths land without much weight.
The violence is frequent and graphic, and readers should be prepared for gore, grief, cruelty toward the disabled, deprivation and that single explicit encounter. Even so, The Tarot Trials by Katee Robert keeps its promises as a first volume. The contest is settled by the final chapter. The questions it raises are not, and the final pages are quiet and reflective rather than a cliffhanger.
Before the Tarot Trials, a Tarot Reading
The book has a long origin. In the acknowledgments Robert recalls a tarot reading in a New Orleans shop in 2013, at a low point in their career, that set off a chain of hard decisions ending here, and they describe this novel as a deliberate pivot. They also name the books it answers: The Hunger Games, on the question of whom such games really serve; Kresley Cole’s tarot-driven Arcana Chronicles; the great wall of A Game of Thrones; and Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, behind the respect shown to the city’s sex workers. A Moon card from a favourite deck, they add, sat on the desk throughout the writing.
Readers who first met Robert through romance will recognise the frank sensuality and the found-family warmth, and those who followed their pirate fantasy that began with Hunt on Dark Waters will see how far the worldbuilding has grown. The Tarot Trials by Katee Robert is the most ambitious thing they have written.
For a next read, The Games Gods Play by Abigail Owen offers another mortal pushed into a deadly contest as a god’s unloved champion, with more romance in the foreground. Red Rising by Pierce Brown is the harder, bloodier version of a gifted outsider infiltrating a ruling class through its own murderous rite.
Where It Leaves You
The prayer on the rooftop turns out not to have been wasted, though the novel takes its time proving it. The Tarot Trials by Katee Robert is uneven, repetitive in places and rushed at its climax, but it is driven by a real fury about who eats and who prays and who gets to decide. By its end Kestrel has no illusions left about the people who run her city, or about the gods who chose her. The second book has a great deal to answer, and this one has earned the asking.