STATUS: First book in The Ascendance Trilogy
AUTHOR: Jennifer A. Nielsen
GENRE: Young Adult, Fantasy, Adventure
PUBLISHER: Scholastic
LOVE TRIANGLE: Not yet. Give it time.
PAGES: 352
I think it's impossible to read this book and NOT compare it to (1) Megan Whalen Turner's "The Thief" and (2) Victoria Aveyard's "The Red Queen." Both feature thief-protagonists --
Sidebar: Are thiefs the new vampires? It seems so.
--who eventually fulfill royal roles. Turner's Gen is a similarly unreliable narrator -- although I think she pulls off that unreliability a bit better. Even at the end, you're still not quite sure where you stand with Gen. Aveyard's Mare is a similar-but-notably-different character -- perhaps because she's female? -- more reliable (you never feel like you can't trust her; in fact, the story works because Mare's uncertainty and precariousness mirror the reader's uncertainty) yet VERY unwilling to fill the role she has to play. But the thing with Mare is that she does whatever she has to in order to survive: readers learn through her internal monologuing that she despises the role she has to play, but, in the end, she goes along with it. (Mare also has a family, whereas Sage does not...here, gender stereotypes seem to be at play: the boy gets the "luxury" of being an unencumbered orphan whereas Mare's desire to protect her family forces her to accept the "unthinkable." Hmmm. Must meditate more on that.)
