Hmmm you make a good point, but then he should seriously consider not calling anyone a protagonist, and he should consider not including the beginnings of a character development and leave it unfinished, which was what bothered me the most.
We have two boys and their really close friendship, and Pug's weird uncontrollable powers. This smells of protagonist and character focus, hence my disappointment when it turned out to be a 'hoax'. We hear only briefly about Arutha since it's all told from Pug's point of view (seeing as he's the main char) but suddenly everything revolves around Arutha, who he is and what decisions he might make, it's very very backwards to me.
Good book, good story, it's not that. Calling anyone protagonists here is simply falsely advertising it. Sadly the first few chapters with Pug and Tomas was part of the advertising. Had it only been the blurb on the back I could have accepted with it - it's often the authors don't write that themselves anyway, but it's as if he started the book meaning to write about Pug, then changed his mind and decided to include Tomas as a main char as well, then he realised that the focus of two young boys was entirely useless if he wanted to tell a good and realistic story about a war of this scale so he had to include that minstrel (what was his name again?) even after the boys had grown older, then he seemed to realise that those special characters he'd meant to be his mains were too special and thus too far from the centre of things, so he needed to focus more on the normal people dealing with the politics and all, hence Arutha came in. Basically it seems to me that he changed his disposition while writing the book.
