By Jennifer A Nielsen

You have no idea how many times I’ve read this book. Frankly, neither do I. All I know is that I read it for the first time for Battle of the Books in eight grade, and then again in ninth grade, where I finally finished the series.

This book is so good. There’s practically nothing else I can say about it. If you like sassy main characters who don’t take anything from anyone, you will like this book. If you’re a fan of books where the main characters are participating in something a bit underhand, you will like this book. If you like unreliable narrators – read this book!

Here’s the basic plot overview. Sage is a normal orphan who does normal orphan things, like stealing, getting into trouble, and escaping from people who want to catch him. One day, he gets caught (as you could probably have expected). But he doesn’t get caught by the authorities and prosecuted for his petty crimes. He is caught by a nobleman named Conner, who is looking for a boy who resembles the long-missing dead prince to play the part. Sage, along with three other boys, foots the bill. So he and the others compete for the role of the puppet prince. Sage has his doubts about the plan, both its success and its morality, but he doesn’t have another choice. Because Conner is a patriot, and will do whatever it takes to keep his country out of civil war.

Now when picking up this book, you may think to yourself that the plot line looks overdone, it looks familiar, it looks like your run-of-the-mill fantasy book about a fifteen-year-old boy in a competition, if he doesn’t win he’ll be killed, blah blah blah….

But wait. There’s so much more to this book than you realize. Yes, it can be a bit slow at the beginning, and from a distance, it may seem normal. But this book will hook you by the end. This was one of my favorite books of late middle-school and early high-school because of how good the plot twists are. And it has an unreliable narrator, which I love.

If you’ve read The Mark of the Thief by Nielsen, you’ll like this one. You may, like me, think that the main characters are the same person because they sound so similar and start calling them by the same name (but in my case I read The False Prince first).

So I encourage you to give this book a try. Pick it up, read it through (it should go fast like other Nielsen books), and I am confident that you will love it.

And if you like this book, there’s far more where it came from. This series (called Ascendance) has 5 books. The best one (in my opinion) is the third book (iykyk), but the 2th one was fun as well. I do have to say, it was originally going to a trilogy, but Nielson then wrote the 4th and 5th books several years later. To me, they feel a bit redundant and aren’t my favorite, but there are still some good parts. Read the whole series, but really read the first 3 because those are the great ones.

Almost forgot this, but the only content warning I have is that there is mild romance. It’s nothing explicit, but it is there, and it increases as the books go along, but is always very family friendly.

General Stats:

• Genre: Fantasy
• Book 1 of 5
• Age: 6th grade and above
• My rating: ★★★★☆