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"The Thief" by Megan Whalen Turner
When this first arrived from the library I thought "Wait, Newberry Award Honor Book? Am I reading young adult fantasy? Crap.". But then it quickly grew on me. It flowed very nicely and I liked the characters and story (no female characters, but that made sense in context), and the Greece inspired worldbuilding was understated but effective. It felt like a real country, I can't think of any other fantasy I've read with a convincing Mediterranean climate(*). Also the protagonist Gen is quite dark and no big deal is made about it. But apart from the fact that I liked Gen more when I thought he was a teenager rather than an immature twenty something (EDIT: oh, ok, he is a teenager), there was one thing that I predicted early on and knew would retrospectively really annoy me if it happened, and it did.
SPOILERS!!
I was really taken with how three dimensional and relatable Gen was, rather than being some irritating cliche of a lower class character. And then I realised that he was probably going to turn out to be a king or something. And lo, he was the cousin of a Queen. And then he complained about how HORRIBLE it was being forced to act like an icky poor person :( This also explains the avoidance of lots of long boring exposition about his family and life etc, which I had thought was just nice subtle writing. I also didn't like that the student who was a poor second son was driven to betray them all through jealousy, unlike the kind sweet heir to the throne. It's making me feel very unenthusiastic about reading the other books in the series.
The previous pseudo period fantasy novel I read did a similar thing. I have some vague nebulous thought about British writers remembering that lower class people exist but presenting the good ones as fairly happy with their lot, while writers from the US are more likely to have a subconscious bias that anyone in the story worth paying attention to will have been upper class all along. I think the relative Australian-ness of the setting of "The Thief" didn't help with me feeling like the story had betrayed me, since here we have a long history of seeing thieves as heroes and kings as annoying oppressors to be thwarted and mocked. Maybe I should try reading more Australian fantasy, see if it pisses me off less. (Probably not. It's not like Australians aren't horribly classist too)
Also, this isn't about classism or whatever, but I think I was supposed to start liking the Magus at some point, and I didn't. It felt like she started with some morally complex characters with interesting relationships and smoothed it all out to everyone left alive at the end being good decent people who wanted the best for their countries and were all super close friends (On the plus side I guess that does make the Magus a sort of sympathetic lower class character). All in all it didn't end up being the book I thought it was at the beginning.
(*)Though this did mean that I kept imagining the mountains they crossed as the Darling Ranges
SPOILERS!!
I was really taken with how three dimensional and relatable Gen was, rather than being some irritating cliche of a lower class character. And then I realised that he was probably going to turn out to be a king or something. And lo, he was the cousin of a Queen. And then he complained about how HORRIBLE it was being forced to act like an icky poor person :( This also explains the avoidance of lots of long boring exposition about his family and life etc, which I had thought was just nice subtle writing. I also didn't like that the student who was a poor second son was driven to betray them all through jealousy, unlike the kind sweet heir to the throne. It's making me feel very unenthusiastic about reading the other books in the series.
The previous pseudo period fantasy novel I read did a similar thing. I have some vague nebulous thought about British writers remembering that lower class people exist but presenting the good ones as fairly happy with their lot, while writers from the US are more likely to have a subconscious bias that anyone in the story worth paying attention to will have been upper class all along. I think the relative Australian-ness of the setting of "The Thief" didn't help with me feeling like the story had betrayed me, since here we have a long history of seeing thieves as heroes and kings as annoying oppressors to be thwarted and mocked. Maybe I should try reading more Australian fantasy, see if it pisses me off less. (Probably not. It's not like Australians aren't horribly classist too)
Also, this isn't about classism or whatever, but I think I was supposed to start liking the Magus at some point, and I didn't. It felt like she started with some morally complex characters with interesting relationships and smoothed it all out to everyone left alive at the end being good decent people who wanted the best for their countries and were all super close friends (On the plus side I guess that does make the Magus a sort of sympathetic lower class character). All in all it didn't end up being the book I thought it was at the beginning.
(*)Though this did mean that I kept imagining the mountains they crossed as the Darling Ranges