A Meditation on the 18th Century

What always struck me about Lloyd Alexander was that while his prose style is elegantly simple, the themes he explored never were. I recently finished the Westmark trilogy with the The Beggar Queen (1984) and was once again impressed by the ideas Alexander played with. The Westmark trilogy begins with a familiar pattern: a teenager gets inadvertently caught up in events much bigger than him and meets a young woman who turns out to be princess, well-trod territory if you’ve read The Chronicle...