For hundreds of pages at a time, nothing supernatural or unrealistic happens at all. While the series is fantasy, there aren’t wizards and magic. (There are guns and cannons, but they’re crude.) Three small kingdoms–Attolia, Eddis, and Sounis–occupy the peninsula, and they’re caught between the Mede Empire to the south (which has a certain Ottoman flavor and is, at times, Orientalized) and various larger kingdoms to the north and, across the sea to the west, that are coded European. The series is set on a Greece-like peninsula in a time not unlike the late Middle Ages or the early Renaissance. Once I realized I had acquired the first three, I figured I ought to read one, right? I accidentally started with book 2, The Queen of Attolia. There’s all these politics, and some romance, and also Hellenistic gods!” And while I said, “oh? I’ll look it up,” I thought, “That doesn’t sound like my thing.”īut as the early books in the series went on sale, I bought them mostly to be polite. She said something like, “It’s hard to explain, but it’s a YA fantasy series that doesn’t feel like either of those things. I heard about the series about six years ago from Brandy at Random Musings of a Bibliophile.

I’ll start with a long non-spoilery pitch, then talk about the titles in a more specific, brief, and spoilery way.

This will likely be a bit rambling (I’m under the weather), but here’s why you should give The Queen’s Thief a try. And it was totally wonderful.īut in wanting to write about why I thought it was great, I realized that I wanted to talk about the series more broadly, because it’s not nearly well known enough and specifically might scratch itches for Game of Thrones and romance fans. This week, I got my hands on one of my most anticipated reads of the year: Return of the Thief, the sixth and final book in Megan Whalen Turner’s young adult fantasy series The Queen’s Thief.

The queen's thief books