Book #34: The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen

I read a really good review of this book on a book blog, and there are really good reviews of it on Goodreads, so I thought I'd try it out. I think the genre for this book was actually even a bit younger than YA--more of a middle grade book (so probably way too young for me to be reading). So maybe I just don't understand or appreciate the genre or audience very much, but I just did not agree with the many good reviews of this book.

Quick plot review: The king, queen, and crown prince of Carthya are murdered in their beds, and in order to save the country from civil war, one of the regents goes to a bunch of orphanages to find a young boy who will act as the long-lost younger prince to unite the country and become the king. Sage, a defiant and angry pickpocket orphan, is one of the boys chosen to try and become the prince. Conner, the regent, trains them and tries to break them to his will--and the boys not chosen are promised that they will be killed.

The plot itself for this story was actually pretty interesting--I liked Sage as a character and felt myself rooting for him. But man, I just felt like the writing in this book was WEAK. None of the dialogue was believable and so many of the characters were just stupid. I found myself rolling my eyes at so many conversations in this book and skimming through them because they were so obnoxious and unrealistic. I think it may have been Stephen King in his book On Writing (or it wasn't and it was someone else) who said that good writing doesn't let you remember that you're reading writing at all. You forget that you're reading anything and you think you're in it--and you KNOW when you're reading something terrible. But that was not the case with this book at all. I'm glad it only took me a few hours to read, and even though it's a part of a trilogy I'm not planning on reading any of the other ones.