★★★★★ Moira's Pen: A Queen's Thief Collection, by Megan Whalen Turner, Deena So'Oteh (illustrator)
A glimpse into Megan Whalen Turner's mind
Moira's Pen: A Queen's Thief Collection
Megan Whalen Turner, Deena So'Oteh (illustrator)
A glimpse into Megan Whalen Turner's mind
Moira's Pen: A Queen's Thief Collection arrived at a good time for me. Every now and again my back decides to torment me with muscle spasms, and I get to spend several days at home immobile until the capricious God of Muscle Spasms frees me. Thus the release at midnight last night of Moira's Pen could not have been better timed. I'm not going to tell you you need to have a bad back to enjoy Moira's Pen, but if you do, it is almost perfect. Almost perfect, but it suffers from one grave fault -- it is far too short. I read it from cover to cover (including even the glossary) in about three hours.
Moira's Pen consists, aside from front and end-matter, of 34 chapters. Since I just told you I read the entire book in three hours, you will immediately deduce that the chapters are quite short. About half the chapters are stories from the World of The Queen's Thief. You must absolutely read the novels before Moira's Pen -- most of the stories will make little sense unless you have done that, and besides, they are very good novels. Being so short, many of the stories are barely stories -- often they are just vignettes, revealing glimpses of key characters of The Queen's Thief at key moments. We are often privy to their thoughts. For instance, two of the stories are about Melheret, whom we met in the series as the Median ambassador to Attolia, in which capacity he did not show to advantage. Seen from behind his own eyes, he is a more sympathetic figure.
I said that about half the chapters are stories. The others tell of Turner's personal recollections and experiences. She describes to us several artworks that inspired items in the novels, for instance, some of the earrings with which Eugenides (Gen) is so obsessed. (We learn a bit more about why that is, too.) Sometimes she also tells us of how she encountered these things. One chapter is a recipe for almond cakes that play a role in the novels. Many of these things are illustrated in drawings by Deena So'Oteh.
There is one thing I was very much hoping for, and I mostly got it, but not as I expected. At the end of the last novel, Return of the Thief, Queen Irene gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Gen named the girl Eugenia, recognizing that she was the new Thief of Eddis, thus his heir in that god-ordained role. I really wanted a story of Eugenia. We get that in the final story, "Gitta". But it is not quite that, and I will leave it to you to find out how Turner handled the descent of the Thief of Eddis.