For years I'd see The Goblin Emperor get recommended on here and I'd get confused as to the context of where it got recommended as all this time I thought it was a YA romance, not a tale of political fantasy.
Turns out that I've accidentally been thinking of The Hollow Kingdom by Clare B. Dunkle instead whenever I'd come across the title of The Goblin Emperor.
Oops.
I read The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks when it came out, but forgot what it was called. For years I thought that's what Assassin's Apprentice was.
When I read Way of Shadows I got confused as to why they were calling themselves Wet Boys. It's not that kind of novel.
I had to have this explained to me it's because they do wetwork/assassinations. But the book does not make that clear in any way at all. It just called them all wet boys and wet girls with a straight face.
I thought The Lies of Locke Lamora was Assassin's Apprentice (whose opening was powerful enough to stick with me for years),
If it helps you feel better, I got very confused about The Hollow Kingdom being called YA Romance. And then I realized I was thinking of Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton.
ME TOO!!
I realised a few days ago that for years, I'd conflated Katherine Addison and Katherine Arden.
...I'm not sure I haven't.
Maia is the best boy
The Goblin Emperor is one of the most, likely the most, comfortably different books I’ve read. I adore it.
It’s an unreliable narrator in the sense that he doesn’t see how much he is positively impacting those around him. He’s altruistically wholesome. That could be so boring. It’s not.
Can we please stop calling every first person narrator unreliable simply because they exhibit the perfectly normal trait of being biased towards their own perspective? That's not what the trope is supposed to mean.
Yeah it's not like, Harrow the Ninth over here. He doesn't have botched brain surgery/possession causing amnesia and hallucinations. It's just personal bias. Very diff.
Wellll those are also because of a pre-existing condition.
I'm sorry, I'm failing to understand how this relates to being an unreliable narrator. Can you please explain?
It feeds into it is my point, it's not just the brain surgery/posession, there's an additional layer that was in play before, and after all that.
I guess? Honestly I was just adding an example of an unreliable narrator, not trying to expand on why the book I choose as an example is even more of an example.
I love The Locked Tomb series, it is a very multifaceted gemstone labyrinth that you really have to experience to understand.
I get that, I was simply expanding on what you were saying, and adding clarification as like you mentioned, it's a series about layers, and it seems an important one to point out that when it comes to that character, what causes her to be unreliable is similarly multi-layered, that's all.
I read it like once a year when I need some warm and fuzzies.
I've heard many similar things about The Hands of the Emperor.
Both books are now comfortably near the top of my TBR pile.
Absolutely true of HOTE and the sequels, though HOTE is an absolute doorstop of a book and so are the sequels-- though the spinoff and side character novels are shorter and imho more variable in quality and likeability. Still worth a read, though. I loved the main series, as they are court intrigue and good government novels, but in contrast to TGE they have an older protagonist who-- when it comes to his job-- is more self-confident.
HOTE can be hard to find in stores sometimes but you can buy the ebooks and physical books (trade paperbacks) from the author's website.
Both are very, very good.
Is it the one by Victoria Goddard or Rob Sanders
Victoria Goddard, my bad!
Thanks 😊
Because of this comment, I have put a hold on this book. Thanks!
Just like me
That's funny because I always confused it with The Hands of Emperor by Victoria Goddard.
I avoided The Martian for a very long time thinking it was about an alien.
That's absolutely fair lol
For years I thought The Goblin Emperor was comical writing, like a mix of those Orcs books and the goblin king scenes in the Hobbit prequel(s?).
Instead, I picked it up last year and it turns out to be one of the most beautiful, thoughtful, meditative novels I've ever read.
i enjoyed it. also other books by the same author.
the follow up trilogy is a beautiful series about grief and regret.
It's a very different sort of book.
Well did you at least enjoy it despite not being what you expected it to be about?
I've yet to actually read it lol. In fact, I didn't read it for the longest time because I thought it was a stockholm romance - which it isn't, I was thinking about The Hollow Kingdom this entire time like I said lol - and only just found out today that it's something completely different.
I liked Goblin Emperor for its comedy of manners stuff and underdog story, but I thought the main character would be quickly assassinated if it were real.
I think the whole book only takes place over a few months, though.
I thought it was YA too, because an elementary school I remember seeing the second book of a series that was titled something like the Goblin Queen. I just remember because I was so excited to read it, but couldn’t stand the idea of starting a series in anything but the first book.
Haven’t been able to find that book online because of the goblin emperor, and probably because my book research skills are lackluster.
Every time someone recommends a Robin Hobb series, I think of The Chronicles of Prydain and honestly I'm not sure why
My 10 year old loves the Goblin Emperor, as do I. It's definitely not YA to me though. Tbf the 10 year old isn't allowed to read YA yet.
I mean it does say YA on the tags page tho. Isn’t it YA but just not YA romance?
YA can be what you make of it, but there’s no way I would personally consider the Goblin Emperor YA.
'the tags page' - Goodreads perhaps?
Goodreads is not a very good site. You can sort of get some info out of it, but basically it's unreliable as hell.
the main character is 18 thats literally the only connection to YA i can think of, its not YA at all imo
it was written by a woman, so it gets tagged YA
im out here wracking my brain and I didn't think of that, thats a really good point
I noticed it with Thief of Night and Iron Widow being marked YA.
Those two are NOT YA at all
It has gotten better, but it is still truer than not.
Like Mistborn, how is that not YA?
Or Red Rising?
If the two above are, then those two should be as well
Maybe i could see an argument for the first red rising book bordering on YA but the series is a whole is pretty mature
So are the books that were written by women, but are marketed as YA. The holly black book "thief of night", the protag is in her late twenties.
Red rising, the dude is a teenager for most of the series.
My point is not that Red Rising and Mistborn should be YA, but that the label YA is inconsistent and used incorrectly.
I’ve seen Poppy War shelved as YA a couple times. It is shocking how often an author being a woman makes people think YA.
Yeah that is another perfect example!!
YA is really nothing more than a marketing term.
I mean YA can sometimes be a pretty broad category so it depends on how you define YA. The main character is 18, so maybe thats why it would be tagged that way? I think that is a bad fit honestly.
This book irritates me. It could have been really good, but just ended up annoying me for a lot of reasons.
Wonderful book. Sadly the sequel is nowhere near as good.
I get the Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison mentally mixed up with The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard. I've only read the former and wasn't a fan.