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I read this book probably in the mid/early nineties. Or well, I read part of it. I was a teenager and my parents were mormons, my Mom saw that there was some sexual stuff in the book and took it away.

Anyways... It's about a boy who has trouble in life because he can't seem to keep from blurting out things bluntly, but he's visited by someone from another world/universe who tells him it's because he's a soothsayer, and he takes him away to this other place to be sort of his secret weapon.

But then his older brother and sister get brought to this other reality by two rivals of the guy who took the main character, and they end up in competition somehow...

I remember it starts off with the family in a Chinese restaurant, playing a game where they each ask another family member a question and the fortune from that person's fortune cookie is then used as the answer, just for fun... But he asks his Mom "When will you die?" because she's got cancer, or something, and everyone is mad at him.

I remember that the person who takes his sister to be his agent is named Ash.

And that's about all I recall.

I swear the book was named Soothsayer or Truthsayer, but I must be wrong because googling comes up with nothing correct for those...

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    I feel like I wanna call your mum and tell her that you're trying to find the smutty book she said you couldn't have.
    – Valorum
    Commented Apr 17, 2016 at 10:50
  • 1
    It really wasn't smutty... Mormons are insanely repressive about sex, and my mother was even more so than most.
    – GammaPaladin
    Commented Apr 18, 2016 at 18:59

2 Answers 2

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Dug a little more with google, and I'm about 90% certain the book was "Riverrun" by S. P. Somtow.

Can't really get any surer since there's no ebook version of it anywhere, and I dunno if I want to pay for a physical book when I can't remember if it was really any good.

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  • I've requested a copy from the library. I'll see if it matches, should you return.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Feb 27, 2019 at 20:20
  • @FuzzyBoots Any news?
    – Alex M
    Commented Nov 8, 2019 at 18:00
  • @AlexM: Ha... truthfully, I forgot why I had requested that book, and eventually returned it, after not having gotten far into it. I'll try again.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Nov 8, 2019 at 18:22
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Was it called Soothsayer: Magic is All Around Us or The Warrior Heir?

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    If you have two answers, it's generally best to split it into two answers. Also, you get better scores if you can provide a little bit of plot summary to indicate why it would be the right answer. :)
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Apr 18, 2016 at 10:10
  • And looking at the summaries on Goodreads, I don't quite get where they'd be a match. The one book does have "Soothsayer" in the title, but is about a female and there's no mention of Chinese restaurants. The second one is a male protagonist, but still no restaurants, and the other details don't seem to match
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Apr 18, 2016 at 12:09
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    Nope. The Warrior Heir is a great book, but it's literally nothing like what I'm talking about. There's no alternate reality involved in that book. I like Chima's work, but nope. The book I am looking for was not YA lit either, which the "Heir" series books are. I was reading it as a teen, but it wasn't YA lit (I rarely read YA lit once I was older than 9 or 10 TBH). And it wasn't the first book linked, for the reasons that have already been mentioned by others (Female protagonist, etc).
    – GammaPaladin
    Commented Apr 18, 2016 at 18:56

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