The False Prince and Other Exciting News

I had planned for my next blog to be all about Delirium, which is the other YA book that resembles Desiderium, but I just finished reading The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen, and had to blog about it. But first, some exciting news! Leah Cypess, author of YA books Mistwood, and Nightspell has agreed to do an interview for us. She is an amazing writer, and managed to publish her first book without the help of an agent. For those of you who don't know much about the industry, that is an amazing feat. We should hopefully have the interview up sometime this week, and I'm working on trying to convince a couple of other YA authors to join us.

On to The False Prince. I've decided to start measuring the awesomeness of a book by how late it can get me to stay up at night. This one somehow managed to get me to stay up until 3:30 a.m. when I had to be up at 8:30, so this book is certified awesome! It just came out a few weeks ago, and I needed something to keep me occupied until Thumped comes out on Tuesday, so I grabbed it off the shelf. To be honest, the description didn't really grab me, but I'd heard lots of really good things about it, and it got really good reviews, so I picked it up.

This is what GoodReads had to say about it:

The False Prince is the thrilling first book in a trilogy filled with danger and deceit and hidden identities that will have readers rushing breathlessly to the end.

In a discontent kingdom, civil war is brewing. To unify the divided people, Connor, a nobleman of the court devises a cunning plan to find an impersonator of the king's long lost son and install him as a puppet prince. Four orphans are recruited to compete for the role, including a defiant boy named Sage. Sage knows that Connor's motives are more than questionable, yet his life balances on a sword's point-he must be chosen to play the prince or he must certainly be killed. But Sage's rivals have their own agendas as well.

As Sage moves from a rundown orphanage to Connor's sumptuous palace, layer upon layer of treachery and deceit unfold, until finally, a truth is revealed that, in the end, may very well prove more dangerous than all of the lies taken together.

This is what I have to say about it:
The brevity of this book's chapters does an excellent job of keeping the reader going. You think, there's only five pages in the next chapter, I'll just get to the end of it, and then boom! You're 20 pages away from the end and you might as well just finish it.

The plot in the first half of the book was a little slow-going, but the second half was a whole different story. A lot of times book jackets like to claim that it will keep you on the edge of your seat, but this one actually lived up to its promise-or at least the second half did. I have to say that the whole time I keep having these nagging suspicions that I knew this book's secret, but I kept thinking there's no way it was possible. Turns out I was right. In a sense, the secret was really predictable because I had seen it coming, but at the same time, the author did such a good job of making you doubt the feasibility of it, that when it was revealed it was still a little bit of a shock.

That being said, I would definitely recommend this book. Now I just have to try to convince my library to buy it, and convince many people at Barnes & Noble to buy it. Check back later in the week for more reviews and author interviews.

As always, thanks again for following me!