Grade: 4 stars
Story Summary: Sage (a scrappy, clever, impudent young thief) is taken from an orphanage to be one of several candidates, all being trained to possibly become the puppet ruler of the entire country. So obviously a whole bunch of cool stuff follows: politics, sword fighting, wild horse riding, secret passage sneaking, history studying, and lots more.
Thoughts: I read a reviewer who liked this better than Megan Whalen Turner's series (The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia). Of course, I didn't believe them, but it still made this book an absolute must-read. And truth be told, it was awesome, but not Megan Whalen Turner. Which isn't actually saying much, because The King of Attolia might be on my list of top five books ever (as evidenced by the shortness and emotionalism of my review). Note that I don't know where it would be placed on my top five books, or even if it would be on my top five books. Because a list like that is REALLY hard to make. It's like picking your top two siblings (out of six) or something. ANYWAY, back to the topic at hand...Sage is quite a bit like Eugenides in quite a few ways, like his brashness and extreme cleverness. And I always like thieves and conmen. And the plot had some similarities too, such as (SPOILERS for QoA, visit rot13.com to decode) gur nsberzragvbarq pyrire lbhat guvrs orpbzvat gur xvat bs n pbhagel. Also just the amount of politics among several smallish fictional countries, who have a very uneasy relationship with each other, reminded me a lot of Turner's books. As this type of thing seems to hit all the right buttons for me, it was the perfect book to get me out of another strange reading slump, in which re-reading MWT was not an option for some reason.
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