The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

(Book Review)

Started: August 16, 2017
Finished: September 18, 2017

Why I Read This Book
Over the past few years, I've been concerned that I've been developing an Internet/ television addiction.

I spend hours mindlessly surfing the web, or watching TV, and I seem to have a hard time pulling myself away.

I keep telling myself, "You should read more books and watch less Youtube".  And yet, night after night, I find myself wasting my time watching Youtube.

After spending some time trying to psycho-analyze myself, I decided that perhaps part of the problem was that I was just tired in the evening, and lacked the capacity to engage with the more difficult books on my reading list.
After 9pm, I just couldn't muster the will power to read The Civil Wars by Appian of Alexandria, or Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers.

But endlessly watching Youtube wasn't a solution either.  Staring at a computer screen for hours was bad for my eyes, bad for my posture, and bad for my health.

....The solution, I thought, was to find more light reading to do in the evenings.
And so I went into the bookstore, and looked for the most low-brow escapist fantasy fiction I could find.  And I came away with The Thief.

Brief Background
As always, living in Southeast Asia, my reading choices are limited by the poverty of selection.
There are probably a hundred better fantasy novels out there, but in my local bookstore there was only a handful of young adult fantasy novels, and this series was one of them.
I swear, it is completely impossible these days to find a stand-alone fantasy novel.  Everything is part of a series.
But the series looked intriguing, so I decided to start with the first book.
This is the first book in The Queen's Thief series (W) and (although I had never heard of it before) it was first published in 1996.  So the fact that it's still on the bookshelves 21 years later means that it can probably be considered a classic of sorts.  (Within the YA genre, I figure 21 years is a long time to survive).

Quick Disclaimer and Spoilers
I've got nothing against this book.  It's well-written for a YA book, and Megan Whalen Turner is a good storyteller.
Nevertheless, it's probably not a productive use of time for me, at my age, to spend too many words over-analyzing a Young Adult novel.  So I'm going to try my best to keep this short and sweet.
I'm also going to spoil things, because the book is so short that it's hard to talk about it without giving stuff away.

The Review

This is a fun little fantasy novel.

It's set in a world which is the author's own creation, but which is heavily influenced by ancient Greek and Mediterranean culture.  Most of the names in the book sound Greek, and the pantheon of gods and goddess is reminiscent of Greek mythology.

[Sidenote: The modern fantasy genre as a genre was pretty much single-handedly created by Tolkien.  And Tolkien was interested in Norse mythology.  Which is why most fantasy books have an old Northern European feel to them.  If Tolkien had been interested in Greek mythology instead, the genre would look totally different today.  Megan Whalen Turner's book is an example of how the genre would look if it had been influenced more by Greek culture than by Norse culture.]

I was pleasantly surprised in the beginning chapters to see how well-written the book was.
The story is told through the first person narration of the main character Gen, and through her narrator, Megan Whalen Turner has a great conversational narration style going on.  It really carries the reader effortlessly through the pages.

The characters are also intriguing.  At least initially.
At the beginning of our story, our hero is forced on a journey against his will with 4 other characters, who are in part travelling companions, and in part jailers.
At first, we really don't know anything about these characters, and we're not sure if they will grow to become friends, or adversaries.
Megan Whalen Turner plays with this expertly.  Right from the beginning, she shows us both the strict authoritarian side of the Magus (the leader of the journey) as well as his more sympathetic side.  So the reader is constantly guessing to see if he and Gen will end up becoming friends or enemies.  And Megan Whalen Turner keeps this suspense up throughout the whole book.

There's another boy on the journey, Ambiades, who develops an antagonistic relationship with Gen.  Throughout the book, I kept wondering what was going to happen.  Would this be one of those stories where Ambiades starts out like a jerk, but by the end of the book we see his noble side, and he and Gen develop a mutual respect for each other?
Or was Ambiades going to be like Malfoy, where he starts out like a jerk, and then just keeps getting worse and worse as the story goes on, until by the end he has nothing redeemable about him?
The dynamic starts out with a lot of promise, but unfortunately it doesn't get developed much further than that.  We never get to see a more complex side to Ambiades.  He ends up being just a villain in the end.
And worse, we never get a satisfying show-down with Ambiades.
If he was just going to be a one-dimensional villain, fine, but then at least give us some sort of climatic showdown between Ambiades and Gen.  Instead Ambiades just quietly dies off-screen.
 (Actually that being said,  although I found Ambiades story arc to be unsatisfying in general, I do think it was a bold move for Megan Whalen Turner to finish off Ambiades by just having him get pushed off a cliff off-screen.  There's something fascinatingly chilling in the whole callousness of the death. Especially considering Ambiades was still just a teenager, I didn't expect him to just get pushed off a cliff suddenly.)

As for the main plot:
The story is a classic journey story.  The characters set out on an expedition, find a treasure, and then return.
The story stagnated a bit in the middle, with a bit too much description of the journey, but on whole the book was short-and-sweet enough that there is little to complain about.

Also there is a surprise ending which reveals none of these characters are who they said they were.  It was a good twist ending that caught me off-guard.
Other than that, there's not much more to say.

Notes:
* This video here is a good succinct summary of the book.  I agree with pretty much all of her complaints, although I wouldn't go as far to say the book is unreadable.  It's short, the prose flows, the book is as readable as you could ask for.  Underwhelming, maybe, but readable.



Video Review
Video review here and embedded below:



Link of the Day
Young Noam Chomsky on Daniel Ellsberg (1969)