Book Notes: "The Thief" by Megan Whalen Turner

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think I found this book through a recommendation by Lois McMaster Bujold (whose own work I can't recommend highly enough) and I'm glad I picked it up.

This book follows a thief, Gen, on a quest to steal a magical object. The twist (well, the first twist) is that he's plucked from his jail cell by a magus and told he'll go on the quest or else.

The story is set in a fictitious world that's nonetheless highly influenced by the world of ancient Greece, and Turner did a marvelous job of it - you can practically see the silver light reflecting off of the leaves of the olive trees.

This story also did something I've never seen done before, and I don't want to talk too much about it for fear of spoiling the fun. Suffice it to say: it's very clever. The whole book is compelling, but after I read the last chapter, I wanted to go back and read the whole thing again, because there's information at the end that casts everything that happened before it in an entirely new light.

Yet even without that extra information, the first read-through is excellent. The story didn't need what she did at the end in order to be a good story - it already was. But the end gave you a second good story, almost as a bonus. It's almost as if Turner wrote two books, and you get to read both of them at the same time, and you don't realize that you actually read two till you're at the end.

And if that sounds confusing, well, the fault is mine. The book's not confusing, not at all. Just good, and clever. Recommended.

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