Like its predecessor, The Thief, Megan Turner’s The Queen of Attolia is engrossing, a novel targeted towards older teens that mature readers will enjoy. (Read my review of The Thief here.)
The Queen of Attolia opens several months after The Thief, with our friend Eugenides once more skulking through a royal palace, this time the queen’s palace in Attolia. The queen is furious at losing face when Eugenides escaped her earlier and is determined to capture Eugenides. Eugenides escapes the palace chased by a mob of soldiers and dogs into a fence, gets a concussion and the queen captures him. The queen decides to teach him a lesson and get revenge on her fellow ruler, the queen of Eddis, and cuts off his right hand. Once Eugenides is healed enough to survive the journey the queen returns him to Eddis.
Attolia’s revenge sparks a low-intensity war, with raids and blockades, one that neither country can win while both further threatened by Sounis and Mede. Eugenides and the Eddis queen divert Sounis, leaving the Medes embedded in Attolia’s court and eager to take over.
A Novel For Adults
The Queen of Attolia is a more mature, more thoughtful book than The Thief. Publisher Harper Collins marketed it under their YA imprint and it’s listed that way in our library system and on Amazon. Older teens will love the story but it is written for adults, even more so than The Thief.
Eugenides narrated The Thief in the first person, letting us revel in his cleverness and his success outwitting Sounis and Attolia. Author Turner presented each episode developed and finished it as we expect in novels for adults, but with a sense of fun and lightheartedness. The Magus talked of the looming threats from Mede that could rip to shreds all three kingdoms’ security ad freedom. But overall The Thief avoided deeper issues or emotions.
The characters in Queen of Attolia are older, more thoughtful, more aware of the larger geopolitical landscape. Turner uses the threats to each country’s future and to each individual to show tension between duty and love, imperatives and desires.
Turner relates the story in the third person, covering Eugenides and Attolia in turn, then shifting to the supporting characters while the plot steadily narrows their choices. The Mede ambassador manipulates a way to inveigle Attolia to welcome (more or less) the Medean forces – since treaties prohibit the Medean forces from landing on the mainland without an invitation. Attolia must then decide whom to ally with, Eddis or Mede, and to what extent to build the alliance.
Characters
The Queen of Attolia deals as much with Attolia (the woman) as with Eugenides. Turner develops her character by showing us how she responds to threats now and how she dealt years earlier with the problem of succeeding her father without being supplanted by her unloving fiance and erstwhile father-in-law. She learned to be ruthless, direct when needed and discrete when that served. She has forgotten how to love, if in fact she ever did.
Eugenides is very well done. One thing I particularly liked was he was afraid, terrified in fact, of dying by inches, of losing his sight, being maimed. So often heroes in YA fantasies are too caught up in their nobility to feel fear, and this was one reason I felt the book appealed to older audiences. He too could be ruthless or charming, whichever he needed.
Nahuseresh, Mede ambassador to Attolia, is masterfully done. He is wise, yet so constrained by his expectations for a proper female role (i.e., not as Queen Regnant) that Attolia can manipulate him – while he believes he is the puppet master, whispering advice and insinuating himself into Attolia’s favor.
Summary
I enjoyed The Queen of Attolia very much. It is not a challenging book, no strange names, fairly short, straightforward plot, but the characters were well done and the plot moved along. I’m looking forward to borrowing book #4, The King of Attolia. 4 Stars.
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