Age Range?

[Beth, Moderator]

This book is a lot of fun, and we think it works well for a range of kids. It reads young, so I'm comfortable recommending it to elementary kids, but it has has adventure (people die! the kingdom is threatened! our protagonist is a trickster!) enough that adults or older kids reading it don't stop to grade it that often.

I keep forgetting how old Sage is -- he thinks of himself as a competent adult, but I think he's actually about 13?

My kids don't see him as uber-competent -- after all, he's not even a great swords man. They liked the way he tackled the problems, both the ones he tells us about and the ones he is hiding off screen.

[library_jim, Creator & Organizer]

Yes, the wide age-range appeal is something I noticed as well. It could be shelved in kids books, YA or adult at a book store and the buyer would be happy.

I don't know that he's super-competent, but he definitely doesn't sound like a normal teen. But I'll give that a bit of a pass since it's a good story. But the villains were perhaps a bit too easily manipulated at times. And half the time he seems to put himself in danger for no real apparent reason.

[Cliff, Moderator]

My thoughts when I was reading it was that Nielsen was trying to appeal to readers at the same age range as Sage, which would be around 14-15.

But I kept revising that number, upwards with each death and then downwards when Sage acts like a young boy or when we meet a character that is plainly good or evil. Less so, in the False Prince, but in the sequels, I really felt that there was no gray in Nielsen's characters. You were either pure evil or else good.

And with the False Prince at least, I didn't feel that Sage was super-competent. She explained away most of his competency as being something he learned years ago. Plus she always needed to remind you that Tobias is the most book-smart and Roden is the better fighter (or so we are led to believe).

Once you start into The Runaway King though, Jaron starts to be able to pull off miracles.