The Thief

I suppose any book will accumulate reviewers who love or hate it, but I can't help being puzzled by both in this case. It seems to me a competent and sufficiently entertaining story, neither boring nor wonderful. It travels unhurriedly to where it wants to go, and readers who demand the clash of swords on every page may be bored, but I'm not one of them.

It's described as a fantasy novel, but it's not strongly fantastic. Like most fantasy, it's set in a world similar to Earth in mediæval times, but apparently not our Earth. I don't see any magic at work in it. There are gods that seem to be real; in this book, they could be argued to be figments of the imagination or hallucinations, but it seems clear from the sequels that they're intended to be real.

The first-person protagonist is a youth of unspecified age, apparently adult, and a professional thief (hence the title). Some readers like him a lot; I found him tolerable, but rather annoying for much of the time. In the sequels, he becomes intermittently likeable.

I'm also puzzled that this is described as a Young Adult novel. It seems to me a normal light-fantasy novel. The hero is a young adult, yes, but so are the heroes of very many other novels. Whatever next? Are we going to see novels categorized as Middle-Aged Adult novels or Elderly Adult novels? Bah, humbug.

The hero is described as a skilled and clever thief, but the author usually makes life easy for herself by showing the results rather than the process: we find out that he's stolen this or that, without seeing how he does it.