"The Rules of Fortune"

The Rules of Fortune by Danielle Prescod

Amazon First Reads January 2025 (2/2)

Pages: 288 Genre: literary fiction

Rating: 2 Stars

Kindle Highlights

The Carter family is on their Martha's Vineyard estate preparing to celebrate the 70th birthday of the patriarch, William Carter Jr. But as the question of succession is looming over the family, security concerns are being raised. The Carter legacy was built on dark secrets, and they can't risk those secrets getting out. The daughter, Kennedy, hasn't helped matters — what was meant to be a quick video honoring her dad turned into an exploration into the Carter Corporation's origins, and the truth she is close to uncovering may have a disastrous impact on the family.

I was really disappointed by this book. While there were some moments that caught my attention, the majority of the book was boring and overwritten. The official description talks about a book where a young woman is uncovering secrets and forced to make interesting moral decisions, but the actual book is about William Carter Jr.'s origin story with some other stuff peppered in.

Kennedy was actually a remarkably weak character. Her documentary was barely relevant, and she was noncommittal about everything. The book routinely tried to make me care about her story, but she didn't do anything; the plot moved forward in spite of her, not because of her. Considering she's the main character mentioned in the book's description, it was really disorienting for her to be so irrelevant.

The plot was bizarre. The book isn't pretending to be a mystery, so I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's a bad mystery book. But the book would've benefitted from borrowing some things from the mystery genre, because every "big reveal" was basic and boring and predictable. Like, yeah. The capitalist billionaire whose one and only goal in life was to make money did some unethical things. But it seemed like I was meant to be stunned. If you've ever heard of how companies like Disney work, nothing will be shocking to you either.

Even the "really bad" big reveals were never actually that bad. The book really seemed to struggle with how its characters were meant to be portrayed. Nobody was a good person, but they also weren't that bad either. Unfortunately, this meant that everyone was quite bland, and none of the drama was actually that intense. I don't want to spoil the one big reveal, but it was about half exciting as it should've been because the author didn't want to make the characters irredeemably evil (even though that would've been a much better story).

The organization was very bizarre too. There were three types of chapters: Past, Slightly Before, and Current Time (these are my titles, the book marks them by months/years). The first part and last part of the book were primarily in the current time, where the family is dealing with the aftermath of William's death. The middle part of the book would waffle between Past and Slightly Before. Except, all of these chapters were written in the present (for example, despite being "William Carter Jr. in 19whatever," one chapter references Kennedy's documentary), so I don't understand why they were marked as Past. Then the Slightly Before chapters would start in the Slightly Before time with the character reminiscing before ultimately jumping to the past, usually picking up the timeline from the chapter before.

If this sounds confusing, yes! I agree! It was confusing! I don't understand why it was organized in this way. Maybe this is a niche complaint and not something that would matter to other readers, but I found it incredibly distracting.

Another big aspect of this book was the intersection of race (the Carters are a Black family) and wealth. I found the concept of this very interesting, and I enjoyed some of those moments. Unfortunately, I don't know how well this aspect was incorporated into the narrative. I mentioned earlier that it seemed like the book struggled to commit to the characters being bad people, and I think this might've been part of it. This book wanted to be nuanced so badly, but unfortunately it just came across as "bad people doing bad things" and then, separately, "the experiences of Black people." This aspect was just not very well written to me, which was unfortunate because I did find it interesting.

This book had a lot of potential. There were some moments where I was engaged with the story. Unfortunately, though, most of the book just fell flat.