My sister introduced me to Megan Whalen Turner’s beautiful fantasy series with The King of Attolia, which I read and reviewed last year. I fell in love with it. Last month I read the first novel in the series, the Newbery Honour winner The Thief, and it stole my heart (pun intended).
From the back cover:
“I can steal anything.”
After Gen’s bragging lands him in the king’s prison, the chances of escape look slim. Then the king’s scholar, the magus, needs the thief’s skill for a seemingly impossible task – to steal a hidden treasure from another land. To the magus, Gen is just a tool. But Gen is a trickster and a survivor with a plan of his own.
Original, clean and beautiful
I absolutely love the fantasy genre, but one of my biggest peeves is that one can very quickly fall into clichés here (I’ve written/tried to write a lot of fantasy myself, so I can testify to how easily this happens). Many times I’ve read a novel and thought, “You know, I feel like I’ve read this kind of thing twenty times before . . .”
Megan Whalen Turner, however, manages to be completely original in her novels. While the world she creates feels like a mixture of ancient Greece and Byzantium, it’s also unlike anything I’ve encountered. Her plots are amazingly unique, too, with twists that left my head spinning. She weaves shocking, plot-changing revelations so subtly into the story that you almost miss them and do a double take a paragraph later: “HE WHAT?!” And you frantically go back, reread it and shake your head in admiration . . .
And her books are clean (sometimes hard to come by in fantasy, especially the recent ones). There’s no sex or pointless, unrealistic romance, and no dark magic or demonic content. Although there is bloodshed, it isn’t gory or excessive, and the characters don’t happily embark on killing sprees.
There is, however, a pantheon of made-up gods, and some language, the worst being several uses of “bastard” (but generally it’s more cuss words/mild expletives than hardcore swearing).
In addition to the mind-boggling plots, Turner’s language is beautiful. She sucks you in from the start and keeps the pages turning. Her prose is lovely, but almost sparse. The dialogue is real (yay!) and hilarious, but sometimes so subtle that you have to reread it before the giggles hit.
Did you catch my mention of the Queen’s Thief SERIES? That’s the best part: there are six novels set in this marvellous world 😀 Although it’s not crucial that you read them in order, it’ll definitely help. The order is:
The Thief
The Queen of Attolia
The King of Attolia
A Conspiracy of Kings
Thick as Thieves
Return of the Thief (coming in March 2019)
To quote BCCB on The Thief: “To miss this thief’s story would be a crime.” So what are you waiting for?! 😉
Your turn! Have you read any great books lately? What about any good fantasies? 🙂
Only by Grace 