The Last Siege

#121
Title: The Last Siege
Author: Jonathan Stroud
Publisher: Miramax
Year: 2003
Genre: young adult
297 pages

A delightful and well-delivered young adult novel from the author of The Bartimaeus Trilogy, The Last Siege plays with the conventions of fantasy while lightly skirting the genre. Stroud's characters are believable, which is important to the reader's experience, since they are not always credible. Indeed, a major strand of the novel involves the characters' evaluation of the others' reports about their own trustworthiness and experiences. The situation into which the teens are drawn is made plausible by Stroud's shaping of the narrative, and all three characters are largely sympathetic. Stroud may be forgiven a continuity flaw or two (early on, Emily's sled simply disappears from the tale). He picks his details well, and if you're not cold and exhausted by the end, you're not reading attentively enough.