Hideki Exposition (->Teen)

[mzyra]

Somebody made the terrible mistake of giving me the opportunity to exposit at length about one of my characters :D  This'll teach them! (But we can still love them really ;) )

Comments

[esmeiolanthe]

Megan Whalen Turner is probably the best writer I've ever encountered for playing 100% fair and still surprising the heck out of you. In particular, her book "The Queen of Attolia" comes to mind: the climactic plot point seems to come completely out of nowhere, but if you re-read the book, you can see that she started setting it up on roughly page 6, and that there were all these points along the way where you could interpret things two ways: the one that made the climax completely obvious and the one that you actually went with.

There are currently four books in that series, of which "The Queen of Attolia" is the second. (The first book is usually filed in the children's section; the others are usually filed with the teen books.) They are all well written, and that playing-fair-and-still-surprising-you is, to a greater or lesser extent, present in all of them. It takes her six years between books, meaning that she'll finish the last one in about 2022, but they are /well/ worth the wait! Highly recommended in general, and also in specific if you're interested in doing that kind of plotting.

"The Queen of Attolia" itself is a formula romance, really. You know: boy breaks into girl's house, girl cuts off boy's hand, boy's cousin starts a nasty three-way international war about it... all the usual stuff. :)