Book: Graceling by Kristin Cashore

So, I was looking around for some YA fantasy featuring female protagonists or something, and someone reccomended this book to me. Sounds good!

The description on Amazon.com goes:

"Katsa has been able to kill a man with her bare hands since she was eight--she's a Graceling, one of the rare people in her land born with an extreme skill. As niece of the king, she should be able to live a life of privilege, but Graced as she is with killing, she is forced to work as the king's thug.

When she first meets Prince Po, Graced with combat skills, Katsa has no hint of how her life is about to change. She never expects to become Po's friend. She never expects to learn a new truth about her own Grace--or about a terrible secret that lies hidden far away . . . a secret that could destroy all seven kingdoms with words alone." 

The world-building in this book is a bit light for how I prefer my high fantasy worlds to be built, but still very realistic. For example, not everyone is born with a "cool" Grace like killing or fighting - instead, it's mentioned that some people are Graced with more or less useless skills like the ability to climb trees unusually well. And this does qualify as "high fantasy" pretty well, because although there aren't (so far) elves or dwarves, there are still plenty of castles and kings and swords and all of that.

Then, there's the character of Katsa. She's quickly taking her place as one of my favorite literary characters. She's not just a "strong female character" in that she can swing around a sword. She's also persistent, intelligent, and rather feminist. While there is romance, as one could guess, it's not your typical YA romance, either.  She actually takes time to think about, and discuss, what kind of relationship she wants, whether or not she wants children, and so on. She makes it a point to teach other young women how to stand up for and defend themselves.

There isn't much in the way of a plot - Read the blurb, assume that Katsa and Po end up travelling all around their known world for a while because high fantasy wouldn't be high fantasy without the main characters spending copious amounts of time riding horses from point A to point B in multi-day journeys, and it's pretty straightforward. The book's biggest problem is that a genre-savvy reader could probably see the plot "twist" coming from about halfway through the book, but otherwise, it's a solid start to the series.