The Thief (Queen's Thief, #1)

by Megan Whalen Turner

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[b:The Thief|19063|The Book Thief|Markus Zusak|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320456861s/19063.jpg|878368] was a bit unexpected for me. I kept waiting for the moment when Gen would mention something in passing, some acknowledgement that he's a girl pretending to be a boy to survive in a man's world by thieving. But no, Gen is a boy. You'd think I'd have known that going in. Or, at the very least, that I didn't read so many books about girls pretending to be boys and stealing their way through life that I wouldn't expect it as a given.

Once I got on the right side of the fence about the protagonist the book worked. It's a small cast of characters in a fairly simple plot. But the characters all evolved nicely and their relationships shifted and were interesting. I liked the dynamic between Gen and magus particularly, I think because it was the most complicated.

I also liked the journey they were on and the way it resolved itself. Most adventure-journey books I find to be too heavy in geographic description. It's kind of the nature of the genre, because how do you describe their travels without describing the land their moving through. But I hardly ever find it interesting. I'd prefer more relationships, more dialog, more magic and less trees. But, again, kind of part and parcel of the genre so it's not worth complaining about, much.

I didn't find much of any of the plot surprising, but I'm also not the young reader the book was written for.

The thing that I think worked for this book, elevating it above a middle-grade adventure novel mired in scenic description, was everything running under the surface. In that way it's a little like [a:Robin McKinley|5339|Robin McKinley|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1314406026p2/5339.jpg] because [a:Megan Whalen Turner|22542|Megan Whalen Turner|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1241223424p2/22542.jpg] doesn't explain everything. She doesn't spell out all the intricate dynamics happening between the characters and the politics of the different countries. She explains most of it, but there's still currents under the surface, things understood but left unspoken. It makes the story just a little bit complicated which makes it interesting.