Ehhhh, yeah, mostly?? It was DEFINITELY young adult, though. Maybe children's, except that it was longer and without illustrations.
I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't been built up quite so much. It was a pretty good 'introduction to politics' sort of book for kids, but there weren't many of the complexity and compromises that really would show up, and it was on the whole pretty idealized.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Spoiler
It was pretty odd in some respects.
Here you have a biracial new emperor (half goblin on an elfin throne) and, do you know, it almost never actually comes up? It's almost constantly mentioned in the narration, but it's almost all there in the narration because it doesn't seem to have any appreciable impact on the characters' actions or the plot, which I find really unbelievable.
Then you have the whole 'women are property/no rights' thing (typical of fantasies loosely based on the social history of western europe), and THAT almost never comes up except for the main character to, in a wistful ineffectual way, casually agree that it's a waste of potential, and for another character to use it as shallow justification for actions.
Uh.
Okay, then.
The people who were 'good' were good. The people who were 'bad' were bad, for the most part. There was one or two attempts at a little more complexity, but those were clearly supposed to have a great emotional impact.
There were some attempts at the philosophy behind power and the holding of power and the imbalance of power, and ethical ways to use it. I found the notions behind it pretty well thought out, but pretty unbelievable in execution (hugely isolated, socially deprived, undereducated and emotionally abused teenaged boy, suddenly thrust into power, and he's thinking THIS objectively about everything? Uh-huh. Sure.)
Which all makes me look at it and go, 'if you're dealing with someone who has been very sheltered, this is a great book to introduce them to some of these things, and start the thought process going and the conversation. But it's going to seem pretty weirdly shallow to anyone who's been exposed to this stuff much.'
So.... on the one hand, yay book I can recommend to my nieces and nephews. But I want them to start reading it NOW when they are 6 or so, not waiting until they are teenagers.
The plot was a pretty basic, coming-of-age, finding-adult-place-in-society. The main character was introspective and relatively blank-template-"good guy". The world had clearly been thought out pretty carefully, but it wasn't described so vividly that it really ever came to life for me.
I'm kind of damning it with faint praise, but it really was solidly written; the thing that most throws me out of books is spelling/grammar errors, and overly simplistic sentence/paragraph construction. None of that was present to get in the way of looking at the actual story.
Compared to some of the stuff I've been reading lately it was really well done.
It's just more the sort of book that I look at and say, "I want to read this author's books, about six or seven books down the line. Assuming they improve instead of stagnate". There are plenty of authors I read and promptly forget. This is one that I will try to keep an eye on.
Ahhh, it sounds so lackluster. I don't mean to do that. I am glad I went and read it. I do not regret the time spent on it. I will even be recommending it -just, not for a sophisticated audience. I think a younger audience will appreciate it a lot more.
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