Reading notes: 'The Poisoned King'
The Poisoned King is the sequel to Impossible Creatures, which I absolutely loved. The Poisoned King is every inch as good.
Mostly I just want to say "hooray, this series is still great," but here are a few small notes:
- It's consistently great; I haven't read a chapter of either book that I didn't find solid, well-written, and interesting. I'm not sure I could find a single sentence that I'd consider a misstep.
- This genre of book is much more explicitly and deeply moral than other genres. Whatever the author's intent might be, it is effectively impossible to read 500 pages of fantasy novels about young adults fighting apocalyptic forces without drawing general moral lessons from it.
- Another of Rundell's remarkable successes is in satisfying the moralizing ("moralizing" in the non-pejorative sense) expectations of the genre with a modern ethical framework, and expressed in a compelling, fair, and nuanced way. I'd expect any fair reader ought to feel the force of it, and none to perceive political cheap shots or cheaper flattery.1 I suspect this is even harder to pull off than it was 50 years ago.
As I write this, these are now both top-20 books for me.
The contrast I have in mind here is to sanctimony literature, in Becca Rothfeld's sense.↩