Series: The Queen's Thief #6
Author: Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Fantasy, YA, Adventure
Publication date: October 6, 2020
Format: Audiobook
Publisher: Harper Collins
Narrator: Steven West
Book Description: The thrilling, twenty-years-in-the-making, conclusion to the New York Times–bestselling Queen’s Thief series, by Megan Whalen Turner. This beloved and award-winning series began with the acclaimed novel The Thief. It and four more stand-alone volumes bring to life a world of epics, myths, and legends, and feature one of the most charismatic and incorrigible characters of fiction, Eugenides the thief. Now more powerful and cunning than ever before, Eugenides must navigate a perilous future in this sweeping conclusion.
Thoughts:
This is a wonderful conclusion to the series! When you spend a few books in a world reaching the end can be daunting. But it's so worth it!
It's not easy to write a review for the last book in a series that you love. Articulating what drove this story home and avoiding spoilers at the same time is so complicated.
The last installment is surprisingly told not from Eugenides' POV, we follow the Erondites heir. The name sounds familiar, right? Let me help you out. Baron Erondites, whose two sons, Dite and Sejanus, were so memorably disinherited as part of the events that occurred in The King of Attolia, also has a daughter, Marina, whom he’d earlier disinherited for marrying against his will. Pheris, Marina’s oldest son, is a boy who is speechless and otherwise severely physically disabled. Eugenides enters into an agreement with the Baron that the heir to the House of Erondites will be raised in the king’s palace, “away from the malignant tendencies of his family.” The Baron offers up Pheris as a clear F- you to the King's mandate.
Everyone — including Pheris himself — assumes that Pheris will be rejected as a member of the king’s court and sent home, and the Baron, having gotten one over on the king, will then have Pheris killed and make his younger brother Juridius his heir. But Gen, surprising all, decides to clean up the filthy boy and make him one of his attendants.
We see a progressive acceptance of the young man. Initially, everyone, starting with his own family mistreats him. The world has come to assume him to be mentally incapable simply because he cannot speak and due to his physical disabilities. We see Gen take a different route. He starts to have him tutored, it's a rocky climb as Pheris does not trust anyone in the court, especially the King.
Though the series has dealt with disability before in connection with the loss of Gen’s hand, Pheris’s more pronounced disabilities make him an unusual main character. Pheris has suffered greatly in his life, both from physical pains and the cruelties of others. “Little monster” is the typical insult hurled at his face. Pheris is not mentally disabled, though, even though most people wrongly assume that’s the case, helped along by Pheris’s deliberate misbehavior (“the less people want to see you, the easier it becomes to be invisible in plain sight.”). Both Pheris and the people around him have something to learn about the ways in which a disabled person can grow and even serve when given the opportunity and encouragement.
Return of the Thief delivers on the classic elements of a heist-type story– there are well-considered politics, intrigue, and scheming of course culminating in a number of very clever reveals at the end of the book. Another signature trait is that once more we see Gen struggling, moody, and petulant. He wants to throw the seat of power overboard and just run away from the responsibilities of a Kingdom and he makes it in such a hilarious fashion. He's still charming and never without a really dangerous, complicated plan. I will say that Gen’s final plan in this book feels a little off not sure if it's less elaborate and that's why it wasn't as astounding or if I was already building up super high expectations for a last plot reveal that fixes everything and shows that everything happened exactly as Eugenides plan stipulated all along.
It was still very rewarding, don't get me wrong but it felt lacking in a way I can't describe. It was a perfect ending, totally wraps up the series and officially makes it to my all-time favorite series.
I gave this:
This book was used to complete the following challenges:
Complete a series
Show good representation of disabilities
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