After a few days the four have left their horses behind and are climbing a mountain range and Gen realizes where they are going and why. The four head out on their journey, Gen complaining and subtly belligerent all the way. Gen is cleaned up, fed a bit and put in a saddle along with the magus, Pol, a soldier, and two youths, Sophos and Ambiades, whom Gen takes to calling Useless the Elder and Useless the Younger, or even just The Uselesses. The magus, the King's scholar, releases Gen from prison to serve a different kind of term. However, the chance never comes and he doesn't need it. Starved, chained, filthy and lice ridden, Gen is biding his time until he can escape.

He was foolish enough to brag about this theft in wine shops all over the city. When we first meet him, Gen is in prison in the country of Sounis for stealing the King's Seal. The setting for The Thief unfolds with the plot itself, widening as the narrator Gen's world expands. I went into this book knowing nothing about it beyond the blurb on the back and I think that that is actually the best way to do it.

Because of the plot twist and the brilliance of the story and the writing, I'm only going to give you a bare bones summary of the plot and hope that I can make it enticing enough that you will be inspired to read it or pass it on to a young reader.

Actually, I found myself doing this in more than one spot in the book. Should it be in the teen section? I think yes, but not for the usual reasons that get a book shelved in the teen section (violence, sex, drugs.) The Thief is an intricate, layered story with a genuine twist at the end that will have you flipping back and re-reading pages to make sure you know what's going on. So, The Thief intrigued me for more than the obvious reasons.

There are plenty of books in the children's section that I think, not because of content but because of complexities of the stories, should be in the teen section. I am always interested how these decisions are made by the higher ups. Currently, although there are both 'children's' and 'teen' editions of this book series (the only differences being the size of the book itself) my store only stocks the teen edition. The Thief is a book that has been a constant on the shelves almost as long as I have been a bookseller and it has bounced back and forth between being shelved in the children's and teen sections often. With The Thief, published in 1996 and winner of the Newbery Honor the following year, Megan Whalen Turner began a quartet of books that she has just completed.

The thief turner