Book Report: Book of a Thousand Days

Having been on something of a Shannon Hale kick of late, when I spotted her Book of a Thousand Days on the library shelf, I had the contradictory impulses to pick it up and to wait. I often find that reading too much of any one author in a short time is a Bad Idea; I wind up disliking the last one I read.

I didn’t dislike Book, although I didn’t like it as much as the others of hers I’ve read. I hadn’t read the Grimm Brothers tale it comes from (he says, although of course it’s moderately likely that I did read it during my misspent youth, for I got hold of Grimm at some point, which presumably explains either my pusillanimous timidity or my bloodthirsty viciousness, or perhaps both) which might make a difference, and of course it’s possible it really is an inferior book, or it might just be the order I happened to read them in.

Given all my complaining in the past about the trope in YA books where sons of kings are found to be genetically princes and thus wise and good and capable of rule (not to mention prophetically foretold), it was nice that in this book, the chambermaid is found to be, well, the child of poor herders, just as she always thought, but that through her actions she shows herself to be noble and wise and good and capable of rule. The setting is a very stratified one, with a hereditary aristocracy and two or three classes of hereditary peasantry, and in the end, the chambermaid is put on trial for pretending to be of the aristocratic class. She is acquitted, because, you know, story, and also because the whole hereditary aristocracy thing is crap, and our children should read stories about what crap it all is, and how princess is just a fancy way of pronouncing parasite.

Er, excuse me. But it is nice to have a YA book that didn’t get up my nose with reactionary Toryism.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.