I’ve turned off the emoticon converter, largely because I am too lazy to find the css that needs to be fixed. Thanks for the heads up on that!

Privilege is comparable tone-wise, yes. I think it’d read well for a slightly younger reader than Swordspoint, however, or for one of any age who wanted less darkness. Not sure how to phrase this—Privilege balances emotion and passion less rawly, though it’s still very present.

Yes! I often have a sense of “x book lacks a, b, and c possibly problematic features,” but that’s about absence and not helpful for how well the positive features—the ones actually in the book—might play.

I never finished reading The House of the Scorpion and haven’t ever touched The Privilege of the Sword. From what I’ve read of the former, I think it’s probably a teen book; it felt a bit too dark for the tween set, though that would depend a lot on the individual reader. Is The Privilege of the Sword comparable to Swordspoint as far as tone? I see Swordspoint as an adult novel that happens to be teen-compatible.

My own experience of reading books when I was much younger than their probable target audience frequently gives me trouble when I’m trying to calibrate my sense of what books I can recommend to what age groups.

Hmm. I didn’t meet Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising set till college and probably would’ve loved it even more at a younger age. Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion also rates, for me, but I don’t have a clear sense of where the squiggly line between children’s and YA falls. (I’d put Scorpion in the children’s section because it keeps its political concerns mostly offstage; a teen reader would pick up on more of them, but some children would comprehend the novel before their teen years, though they might find it long. Or, at least, I was reading things that dark aged eight through ten….)

For that matter, would you consider Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword YA, or merely teen-compatible fantasy?