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peculiarb 's review for:
A Peculiar Royal
by Alonna Williams
Actual star rating: 2.5/5
"A Peculiar Royal" by Alonna Williams starts out strongly, with the reader being thrust into Tristan's life as a street rat. The first few chapters are all about his life on the streets, and the found family he's surrounded himself with, and the relationships he's grown up with.
Once he's found to be the prince, the tone of the novel changes considerably. With a focus on Tristan's education and shenanigans around the palace, the novel becomes much lighter, almost reading as a middle grade novel rather than YA.
In fact, this is the main problem of the novel. Everything from the characters to the plot are strangely exaggerated. It's something that's usually found in middle grade novels, and it works really well, but it comes off as cartoonish when in a YA setting. I should note that I place it as a YA book because the main character, Tristan, is 17 and the depictions of violence (however minute). Tristan's mannerisms correspond to characters between the ages of 11-14, while violence that draws blood is something generally reserved for older audiences.
However, this doesn't extend to the writing. Williams' uses a 3rd person POV and omniscient narrator, which allows her to jump from character to character mid chapter or sometimes mid conversation. Not only do we get the thoughts of the main characters, but the POV shifts to secondary and even background characters, given the readers a much fuller view of a scene than many other books. More generally, the writing was good. Being easy to read combined with the dynamic plot, made the book fast to get through. It never bored me, and I finished it within a few days.
"A Peculiar Royal" could be a fantastic Middle Grade book, but it loses out being labelled as Young Adult. I recommend this shift in mentality as I enjoyed it more that way.
"A Peculiar Royal" by Alonna Williams starts out strongly, with the reader being thrust into Tristan's life as a street rat. The first few chapters are all about his life on the streets, and the found family he's surrounded himself with, and the relationships he's grown up with.
Once he's found to be the prince, the tone of the novel changes considerably. With a focus on Tristan's education and shenanigans around the palace, the novel becomes much lighter, almost reading as a middle grade novel rather than YA.
In fact, this is the main problem of the novel. Everything from the characters to the plot are strangely exaggerated. It's something that's usually found in middle grade novels, and it works really well, but it comes off as cartoonish when in a YA setting. I should note that I place it as a YA book because the main character, Tristan, is 17 and the depictions of violence (however minute). Tristan's mannerisms correspond to characters between the ages of 11-14, while violence that draws blood is something generally reserved for older audiences.
However, this doesn't extend to the writing. Williams' uses a 3rd person POV and omniscient narrator, which allows her to jump from character to character mid chapter or sometimes mid conversation. Not only do we get the thoughts of the main characters, but the POV shifts to secondary and even background characters, given the readers a much fuller view of a scene than many other books. More generally, the writing was good. Being easy to read combined with the dynamic plot, made the book fast to get through. It never bored me, and I finished it within a few days.
"A Peculiar Royal" could be a fantastic Middle Grade book, but it loses out being labelled as Young Adult. I recommend this shift in mentality as I enjoyed it more that way.