Book rec: The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner
I am going to do this as calmly as I can.
You need to read this series. Please trust me and google nothing about it. All you need to know is what I am about to tell you and the rest are spoilers. You do NOT want spoilers.
The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner is a fantasy series. It is the best series I have ever read in my entire life—not hyperbole, I'm saying it with my whole chest—and the way this woman weaves character, craft, and plot informs every single thing I have ever written ever. It is impossible not to read these books and not become a better writer, IMO.
I promised these recs would focus specifically on the things people love about the Fam, though, rather than generally flailing about good things, so let's talk about Found Family and Good Dads.
First, there is a bonanza of dads in this series—bio, adopted, informal, and manipulate-by-proximity. When you read the first book (shown above, The Thief) for the first time, you'll be inclined toward skepticism, as the POV is very teen brat with little emphasis on dadly things. Trust me. Trust me. Not only do the good dads start to stack across the series, but as you learn to tease out the (canonical!!) subtleties of behavior and affection, your first time rereading The Thief will make you shriek. Rereading the second book will make you feel like you've been stabbed in the chest. It's PHENOMENAL.
And then the Found Family vibes are OFF. THE. CHARTS. These characters, when they choose their people, choose to love so fiercely, so wholeheartedly, and so irrevocably that they go to war. They fight and kill and scheme and plot. But even more importantly, they sacrifice. They show unrelenting mercy and affection and care. My one single freely given spoiler for this series is that at so many different points, the plot could veer into a Greek tragedy, all the more brutal for its inevitability, but instead the characters choose love—gritted-teeth, pragmatic, unrelenting love—and each time the plot trajectory pivots in a way that's still utterly realistic and believable but also refreshing and good.
Also there are secret identities and so many overlapping motivations and the tension between what's good for the populace you're responsible for vs. for the precious few who hold your entire heart—
The Thief is an incredibly quick read. Pick it up, read it, and note how you feel about the different characters and their individual relationships with each other. Then read the second book and watch how it all evolves. If you're not hooked by the end of the second book, I don't even know what to tell you.
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Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett is such an amazing book to me. What if you were insane and kind of a bad person and you brought about the end of time (literally), though did so without any bad intentions, without meaning to hurt anyone, without meaning to stop time, only wishing to make something perfect because you feel that that’s what you’re meant to do and it’s the absence of that perfection that’s driving you mad in the first place.
What if another version of you who is both intrinsically, inherently, genetically you but so vastly different to you due to the vastly different lives you two have lived-completely ignorant of one another’s existence despite both of you living in the same city your whole lives-was somehow destined to stop you and save the world, pulled away from his old life due to talents he didn’t know he had and often couldn’t control and frustrated to no end at the seemingly ever-growing incompetence of his trainer.
What of as a result of this, the two halves of You became one whole person and yet lose almost the entirety of your collective humanity and now have to leave behind the person you love to fulfill the task that you were always meant for since the moment of your birth, and you have lost so much and you cannot go back to your old life because you can hardly keep yourself tethered to the present moment when there is all of time out there calling to you and it saddens you but you can see through time and it’s indescribably beautiful and infinite.
What if you were the unintentional villain and the reluctant hero and lost your humanity to become one of the inner workings of the universe itself.
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https://www.tumblr.com/skullsandcorals/738285799236321280/im-dyslexic-im-not-stupid
1. Holy shit I am so happy I found another person who gets how smart Percy is, and gets that every instance of Percy looking/getting called stupid is due to his dyslexia or people not telling him anything.
2. Which book/chapter is this from? I need to bookmark it ASAP and start shouting it from the metaphorical tumblr hills.
3. We really don't talk about how good a mom Sally is? Like yeah she's badass and gentle but like. She respects Percy. When the school system failed Percy, she's the one who still not only believed that he was smart but still acted like it and probably taught him too. Queen mom Sally Jackson right there.
1.) YEAHH EXACTLY. Or his ADHD 😭 It drives me NUTS whenever Percy is treated as the dumb + comedic guy. Like I get what they're saying and why they're saying it, but sometimes his character gets reduced to JUST that and it hurts my soul. I get that he's funny as a narrator and as a character and sometimes he can be a little "clueless" but it just feels like some people like to think of that as either all he is or a huge part of who he is. I believe I've also seen Leo get this treatment despite literally being insanely smart at such a young age so. that's...fun. They can be funny and smart too 😞
2.) It's from the 10th Anniversary edition of The Lightning Thief! It's Rick's cover letter for the first readers of the manuscript & a note from the narrator. I don't have a copy of that edition myself, but I've seen some pictures of it on Rick's blog and someone posted one of the pages on Reddit (where I got it from).
Here's the full page from Reddit (source) & the picture from Rick's blog where the page is visible (source):
3.) YEEEAHHHH I LOVE HER SO MUCH!!! What I would do to get adopted by her rn. The way she talks to him makes me kinda teary-eyed because she's just so...you can just tell how much she loves Percy and that she would do anything to make sure he grew up resilient and kind in a world that's always out to get him. She believes in him so much that it just makes me lose my mind a little. It's just so sweet and I can't help but feel so moved by it.
I'm not sure if you've read Chalice of the Gods, but there's this scene where (spoilers, kinda) Sally talks to Percy after the whole thing with Hebe and honestly this scene makes me want to sob and cry and weep
“You are a lot of things, Percy. But helpless isn't one of them.”
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