April Book Review Club

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

Look at me! Three posts in six days! Don't get used to it--life is bound to intrude at some point. Anyway, it's April, and our thoughts are outside, so we need an especially compelling reason to settle down with a good book. This is it. Go get it.

Don't forget to click the icon for the rest of The Book Review Club!

A Conspiracy of Kings
By Megan Whelan Turner
Greenwillow, April 2010

I’ll have to be careful reviewing this book, the fourth in the Queen’s Thief series that debuted with 1997 Newbery honoree THE THIEF. If you haven’t read the earlier books—which you should, right now—I’d hate to spoil any surprises. Surprises are all Turner has going for her—apart from spectacular writing, deeply compelling characters, thoroughly imagined setting, and fearless plotting,.

The books follow the fortunes of Gen, the eponymous thief, in three neighboring kingdoms whose shared culture is ancient Greece with guns. Their rulers—two queens and a king, who assume a kingdom’s name upon ascending the throne—have spent the series jockeying for position and strategizing to keep larger empires from gobbling them up. The gods sometimes interfere, surprising the disbelievers.

This fourth book reunites us with Sophos, whom we met in THE THIEF as a student and heir to the throne of the kingdom of Sounis. Like the other high-born characters in the book, he must thread his way through a treacherous world, attempting to resolve the conflict between his dreams and desires and those of a leader. It’s a deeply personal coming-of-age story, but it’s painted on a broad canvas with bold, rich color.

As usual, Turner is a point-of-view trickster. We shift from third person to first person and back again, occasionally dropping into second person, gods help us. What makes this especially impressive is Turner’s ability to make us think we share a person’s every thought and then whack us with a plot twist or character revelation that we probably should have seen coming. Why didn’t we? The woman’s evil, that’s why.

She’s also gutsy. She introduces a mystery and doesn’t much worry about whether she’s confused us. There’s so much going on that we’re content to move along, confident that we’ll figure it all out eventually.

There’s romance, there’s humor… but all with an undercurrent of utter tragedy, constant, almost overwhelming. You sense that, in the end, all this maneuvering will come to nothing—or maybe the gods have some steely-eyed plan that discounts human happiness. The characters sense this, too. And then we all have a good laugh together.

I’m not sure whether these are middle-grade or young-adult fantasy. The Newbery folks obviously thought THE THIEF was for kids rather than teens, and Amazon has them at ages 9-12. Almost everyone else seems to assume they’re young adult. There is a bit of swearing here and there, but although the romance is pretty intense in places there’s no overt sex. Reading comprehension would have to be pretty good.

Regardless of the reader’s age, though, I can’t recommend these books enough.