The False Prince

The book I read was titled False Prince and the author is Jennifer Nielsen. The main characters are Sage (a.k.a Jaron), Conner, Tobias, Roden, Mott, Creagan, Imogen, and Veldegrath. In this story, there is a king and queen of a kingdom, called Carthya.  At the beginning of the story, the king, queen and their older son, Darius, are murdered by Conner, a nobleman who is part of the king’s court.  Four years earlier, before the royal family’s murder, the youngest prince, Prince Jaron, was believed to have been killed by pirates.  In order to protect his youngest son from the pirates, the king declared Jaron dead.   Meanwhile the prince, Jaron, goes undercover as an orphan named Sage.  After murdering the royal family, Connor doesn’t have enough power to take over the kingdom.  So his plan is to find someone who looks like Prince Jaron and bring him to court and show the court that the long lost prince is alive.  Then the prince/orphan would be made king and Connor would be the king’s advisor.  Nobleman Connor finds three orphans, Sage, Roden, Tobias.  He educates these orphans on sword fighting and on becoming a gentleman.  Of the three orphans, Connor chooses Sage as the false prince.   To foil Connor’s plan, Sage reveals to the dead king’s advisor a code word that shows that he is the real Prince Jaron.  Connor gets put in prison for the murder of Jaron’s mother, father, and brother.

The literary techniques that were in this particular novel were foreshadowing, flashbacks and plot twists. There was foreshadowing when Jaron knew that someday the countries around his kingdom would attack (the attack isn’t discussed until the second book)  There was also flashbacks because Jaron, at the end of the book, remembers how he escaped the pirates, who were hired by Nobleman Connor.  There is a plot twist when at the end of the book, the reader finds out that Sage, the orphan, is really Prince Jaron.  Sage tells Nobleman Connor that he is the prince and imprisons Connor for being a traitor and for murder.

There was little figurative language in this book. At one point in the book one character said “Connor has probably been to every orphanage in the country.” Obviously Connor did not go to every orphanage in the country. Conner had said to Sage “You have a clever tongue.” This book had lots of plot twists, politics, mystery, and action.