What’s the Queen’s Thief series about? You seem to really like it!

nimblermortal:

I DO VERY MUCH LIKE IT

I am wary of saying too much, because even the titles of the books are spoilery. And you don’t have to read them in order, but they do still spoil each other. So this is your spoiler warning line, though I’m doing my best to summarize vaguely below.

The first book is The Thief, and it is about a kid who was arrested for bragging that he could steal anything, and then proving it. The king’s magus, the brains behind the thrones, then pulls him out of prison to look for an ancient artifact, the ownership of which makes you rightful heir to a neighboring throne. They tell a lot of myths over the course of the book, so it seems like a kinda okay read maybe, and then you get to the end and BAM. TWISTS. that make the whole book 1000% better when you reread.

The second is Queen of Attolia, when this kid is a little older and making himself a nuisance in a foreign country again. He gets his hand cut off for it and this precipitates a three-way war, which he is not initially aware of because he is sulking, because he is majestic and snarky and petty. When he wakes up, he conspires to steal peace, and he does it, of course, in a tricksy heisty magnificent manner involving the cutest boat hook in the world.

The third is King of Attolia, which abruptly changes viewpoints to that of a king’s guard who has just gotten in trouble for punching the king in the face. Costis is a cute sort of honorable fellow, but we really use his viewpoint to see why the king is king, in two… no, three different ways, and it’s also where my shipper heart is abruptly kicked into gear so that I go back and reread Queen and squee magnificently over everything.

The fourth is Conspiracy of Kings, which shifts POV again to a character from the first book who you might almost have forgotten about; there’ve been throwaway lines to some political stuff going on his country that, if you were invested in him, would make you quite worried, and this is the book explaining why no one knew where he was or what he was doing all this time. And also what he does about it which is, sadly, become epic and badass.

Thematically it’s about what it means to be a monarch, and it’s about the prices paid for different kinds of strength, and it’s a hilarious not-quite-heist story, and it’s about international politics in smaller countries that the superpowers of the world would distinctly like to eat up, and it’s about how we relate to our gods, and it’s about maintaining cultural identity in the face of inevitable defeat.