★★★★☆ The Prisoner's Throne, by Holly Black
You’ve always been clever. Be clever now.
The Prisoner's Throne
Holly Black
You’ve always been clever. Be clever now.
You are doing or saying something stupid. You KNOW, even as you do it, that it's stupid, that you will regret it. You tell yourself, "Just shut up and sit down, right now." But somehow you can't stop yourself.
You've had this experience, because you're human. (Or maybe it's just me. I don't think so. I don't think I'm special.)
It turns out that it's not just humans. Even immortals have this experience. Oak, the hero and main point-of-view character of Holly Black's The Prisoner's Throne, is also like this. Oak is a seventeen-year-old boy in love with a seriously messed up teenage girl, so he's a perfect storm of poorly judged impulse. In fact, when one of his companions asks him, "Is there no situation you’re not compelled to make worse?", he cannot answer "No," not even to himself. The question echoes through his mind over and over.
Oak's impulses matter more than those of most random teenagers, because he's the heir of the Kingdom of Elfhame. We met Oak in The Stolen Heir, the first book of the Stolen Heir Duology, and before that in The Folk of the Air. We also know well the messed-up teenage girl he loves -- she is Suren, or Wren as Oak calls her. She is now the immensely powerful Queen of the Court of Teeth, the former home of the enemies of Elfhame, whom she vanquished. As the story begins she is holding Oak in her prisons. This of course leaves Oak in some doubt as to how she feels towards him. Also, it's an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do, since Cardan and Jude, the rulers to whom Oak is heir, are no pushovers.
I don't think I need to tell you any more of the story than that. Can Oak stop being a screw-up for long enough to cut through all the plots swirling around him and save himself and Wren, not to mention his sister Jude and her husband Cardan?
I liked this a lot, in part because Oak feels like a basically normal teenager to me. Yes, he may be immortal and have magic powers, but he's a teenage kid who's fallen for another teenage kid, and he doesn't quite know what she feels or how to handle it.