Cayla Kluver is a teenager; she completed this novel, as well as high school, at fifteen years of age. She intends to take this year off to finish the second half of the duology and to promote both works, and then she will go to college to study creative writing. Like most writers, she’s been writing as long as she can remember. She acknowledges the great amounts of help she got with this novel not only from her mother, who shares copyright and edited the work, but her English teacher, who helped her with a draft of this book for a large part of a semester. Ms. Kluver says that she was inspired by playing an epic fantasy video game, and wishing that it went the way she wanted it to go, rather than the authors. Subsequently, Forsooth Publishing was born, to promote Cayla’s work.

Alera is the Crown Princess of Hytanica; whoever she marries will become King and ruler of Hytanica, so therefore she has little choice in her mate. Steldor, her father’s favorite, inspires great loathing in Alera, and she will do nearly anything to avoid him. The rival for her affections is, of all things, a Hytanican boy named Narian who was kidnapped by a nearby country called Cokyria very soon after his birth; he returned to them at sixteen years of age and is an enigma to all involved. Why did Cokyria kidnap forty-nine baby boys that year, and only keep one of them (alive)? What are Cokyria’s plans for Hytanica, and why was he allowed to return? Most of all, is there any way that Alera can avoid marrying the arrogant Steldor?

I have only read one other book by an author this young, to my knowledge (In the Forests of the Night by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, which, incidentally, I hated, but I mean to read some of her more recent works before I write her off completely), and I must say that I am very impressed by Ms. Kluver’s ability to sustain a plot over a 440-page book. Her grasp of pacing was fairly good, and she displays some real talent with description. Overall, I could have stood a little less description of people’s clothing, but the book is aimed at a demographic that doesn’t (apparently) include me. Girls who are maybe only a few years out of the Disney Princesses age group will eat the descriptions up and be clamoring for more.

Ms. Kluver created a good deal of characters in her story, and a couple of them even stood out as having interesting depths. Princess Alera, perhaps not so much — while I liked her, she didn’t have very many defining character traits. Steldor, on the other hand, had conflicting enough actions and behavior that I even found him significantly more interesting than Narian. While he was cast as the ‘bad guy’ in the book, when it came down to it, he really did want Princess Alera to be happy, and I seemed to get the impression that he really had no idea how to go about doing that other than trying to impress her with his military prowess. I understood that Alera didn’t like him because she thought he was arrogant, but I didn’t actually see enough of his arrogance in any sort of hurtful way that would fuel her burning dislike of him. I actually thought he had a lot of promise.

Overall, this is definitely a great achievement for Ms. Kluver; I do generally think that the actual mechanics of her writing would be improved by a quick read-through of Stephen King’s On Writing (especially the section on tagging), but her grasp of grammar, sentence structure, and vocabulary are significantly above average for any fifteen-year-old I’ve known. (I would produce a piece of writing from when I was fifteen, but fortunately I burned it all.) The most frustrating thing about the book is perhaps that I only have the first volume of it. I do not know when exactly in 2009 Allegiance, the second volume, will be published, but I would be interested in reading it to complete the story.