To Best the Boys

To Best the Boys

By Mary Weber

Thomas Nelson, 2019, 321 pages, Young Adult Fantasy/Adventure Fiction

Every year, the residents of Pinsbury Port are invited to a celebration at the mysterious Holm manor. While the townspeople enjoy food and entertainment, the town’s college-age boys compete in the Labyrinth—a magical maze set to test their abilities in multiple subjects. The winner of that maze receives a scholarship to the esteemed all-male Stemwick University.

Sixteen-year-old Rhen Tellur dreams of becoming a scientist and helping her physician father find a cure for a horrible plague that’s making its way through the town’s poorer residents. Together with her cousin Seleni, the two girls disguise themselves as boys and enter the Labyrinth. Rhen and Seleni must work together in order to escape detection and hopefully earn their right to go to college. Except not everyone can survive the maze, and not everyone plays fair.

A lot of adventure and a dash of romance and magic makes To Best the Boys a novel that will appeal to a wide variety of readers. Although the town’s residents don’t possess magic, the sea is full of sirens, ghouls come out at night, and Holm’s Labyrinth seems to defy the laws of physics. This adds to the dark and urgent tone of the book, and drives the stakes for surviving in the Labyrinth even higher.

Rhen and her cousin Seleni each have different reasons for entering the maze, but their driving motivation is their desire to be taken seriously instead of being written off for their gender. I also appreciated that although Rhen is smart and inquisitive, it’s hinted that she struggles with dyslexia. 

Although To Best the Boys contains more suspense and the stakes are higher, this book reminded me of Tess of the Road. Both books are set in a vague past, and are about women who chafe at the confines that are put on them for their gender. Both worlds are slightly magical, although the main characters aren’t, and they must rely on their wits to survive.

MB