A boy is clever. The cleverness costs him something enormous. The rest of the book is the bill arriving, and the slow work of learning to carry it.

That is the entire architecture, and it is executed in under two hundred pages. I have read trilogies that attempted less with ten times the room. The economy here is not minimalism — nothing feels withheld — it is simply a writer who knew exactly which scenes were load-bearing.

Against the training-montage school

The school section, which every fantasy novel since has borrowed from, is remarkable for how little it indulges. There are no tournaments. The lessons are mostly about restraint, and the book's position — that power is chiefly a question of knowing when not to — is stated early and then tested rather than repeated.

The magic system is a moral system wearing a costume, and the costume is very good.— The Editor

The reread

Fourth time. What I notice now that I did not at twelve is how much of the book is about shame, and how patient it is with it. The protagonist is not likeable in the early chapters. He is proud and a bit cruel and the narrative does not rush to excuse him. Modern fantasy would give him a wound to explain it. This one simply lets him be young.

The prose has aged better than almost anything of its decade. It is plain in the way that takes enormous work, and it never once winks.