The setting this novel takes place in is a creative project formed from an RPG campaign, story telling and LARPing. (According to various descriptions I've seen about it online.) From this, I take that it a shared universe project of some variety. (Maybe. It seems to have a singular writer, though a singular writer who wants to include everyone who assisted in his development of his setting.)

Plot A involves the town of Böndelheim, which is populated by a mix of humans, and dwarf refugees. The entire town despises magic users due to some extreme generational trauma that the dwarves accidentally passed on to the humans in the population. (The dwarves have very good reason hate magic users: mostly due to their community having been enslaved by same.) When there's an unexpected bumper crop of wheat, the entire town decides to tear out their original crops and plant wheat. No one suspects anything's wrong with the wheat, or that magic could be involved--yet it's clear that all is not well in Böndelheim. Animals are sickening, and the townsfolk are somehow going hungry despite the endless fields of wheat.

Plot B takes a while to appear, but involves Ash and Dale, two mages who have been assigned with figuring which runes still work the way they're supposed to, or discovering what they do now. Their efforts have so far been unsuccessful until they encounter a loaf of bread. The properties of this bread are so unusual they end up going on an expedition to seek out the source of the grain that made the bread. Their attention is eventually drawn to , and it's strangely abundant wheat fields...and very angry, very suspicious villagers, many of them with C-PTSD related to magic-users.

The writer is effective at conveying trauma and inserting the reader into the flash back or dissociation a character experiencing. Some of the humor fell flat with me due to being lighter and more silly than the surrounding story. The writer is capable of going darker, but didn't seem to have a good feel for when or how to apply light or dark humor. So I recommend the book, in the sense that I would like to see more from this writer.

Grand Harvest has a very slow pace! It's clear the author is trying to write from the experience of mundane commoners: traders, artisans, farmer and so on. What would be the NPC contingent in an RPG. Trying, but not quite succeeding. Unfortunately, Böndelheim feels like walking through the set of of a Pseudo European Fantasy Village, not like an actual community. I had no feel for the characters and kept forgetting who certain characters were supposed to be.There is some attempts at introduction by immersion, but I feel that there needed to be more infodumping here, not less. Characterization is very sparse, though the implied culture of the combined dwarf and human village has a lot of potential.


This review was based on galley copy from NetGalley.

I like to read books by writers from outside the US and UK (and Canada/Australia/NZ) occasionally, to broaden my exposure to other world traditions, and I don't know much about Finnish folklore (or, really, Finnish anything) apart from knowing that it was a source for Tolkien, who based Gandalf on a character from the Kalevala and whose Elvish languages were influenced by Finnish. So when this came up on Netgalley - with a cover that playfully references the famous American Gothic painting by Grant Wood - I picked it up.

English has a lot of idioms. I don't usually notice this until I read a book by someone who doesn't have English as their first language (or, occasionally, does have English as their first language but isn't very good at it) and doesn't write it idiomatically. Many of the issues here are, as usual, with the wrong preposition being used, but sometimes it's word order, or whether something is plural or singular. The author mentions the book having had a lot of editing; unfortunately, it still could do with some more, not just for the non-idiomatic English but for some typos, occasional errors in dialog punctuation, and other minor glitches.

Setting that aside, it's an enjoyable fantasy, which walks an unusual line between an overall cozy feel (small town, people just living their mundane lives as farmers and traders and crafters) and a darker undertone; the town is under what could be described as a curse effectively disguised as a blessing, the dwarves who live there (especially their leader) have a harrowing backstory, and there are some bandits who... do not come to a good end. Also, there's been a (possibly natural) disaster which has rendered magic largely ineffective, because what runes do has changed. The dwarves and their human fellow townspeople don't think this has anything to do with them, because, for reasons connected with the harrowing backstory, they don't allow magic in the town, but... it does have something to do with them, and a couple of young wizards have to convince them of this fact in order to save everyone's lives - which they are determined to do, despite some danger to themselves, because, like everyone apart from the bandits, they are basically decent people.

If the book has a weakness, it's that most of the various dwarves aren't distinct enough that I could easily keep them straight in my head, a problem that could be alleged of the dwarves in <i>The Hobbit</i> or, for that matter, <i>Snow White</i> as well. Perhaps it's inherently difficult to make dwarves individual, for some reason. Otherwise, it's an enjoyable story with good emotional beats and arcs. The ending could have been crisper and more decisive, but it's not a big fault. I don't know that I'd bother with a sequel; it didn't grip me really strongly, and the non-idiomatic English was distracting. But it's not a bad book by any means.

Grand Harvest is a fantasy novel with a unique blend of humor, mystery, and horror set in the richly crafted world of Velonea. A world that has yet to recover from "The Scramble," an event that shattered its magic.

Kouvula's novel skillfully mixes moments of levity with a suspenseful narrative, exploring themes of survival and rebuilding in a magical world scarred by past traumas & hardships.

The book's blend of adventure and comic relief, making it both engaging and accessible for fantasy fans looking for a fresh and imaginative story. Grand Harvest marks the beginning of Koivula's Velonea series, promising more tales in this intriguingly fractured world