Trickster's Choice - Tamora Pierce (Daughter of the Lioness #1)

Tamora Pierce is undeniably one of my favorite authors.  Whenever I need a reading reset or get into a book slump, I turn back to her books to get me going again.  When I feel sick or nostalgic I reach for them, too, because they make me feel good.  They have strong female characters, plots that are delightful without being too convoluted or simplistic, and they always interlock in wonderful ways.  On the strong female characters front--the very first thing in this book is not a paragraph-long excerpt, a laudatory review, or a list of Pierce's other books.  Instead, it's a list of other books with strong female characters; how awesome is that?

Trickster's Choice is the first in a duology following Aly, daughter of Pierce's first main character Alanna the Lioness.  Aly longs for adventure, hopefully working as a spy for her father.  She ends up with more adventure than she bargained for when, on a trip down the coast, she's captured by pirates and sold as a slave in the Copper Isles, and then sucked in a wager with a god to keep a family safe from a mad king and his feuding family over the course of the summer.

I've always liked Aly as a character.  She's smart and independent, just like all of Pierce's heroines, but she has a dry wit and a keen sense of sarcasm that most of them lack--in fact, the character whose sense of humor most closely matches Aly's would probably be Neal, a supporting character in Pierce's Protector of the Small series (and who Aly knows).  Additionally, I find the setting here fascinating; while the different regions of Pierce's Tortall universe are all based on different real-world cultures, the Copper Isles are definitely the most lush setting we've seen from her, and the culture probably the most different from the typical European-influenced fantasy settings that dominate her other works. She builds on prior story lines, throwing in little cameos of her other characters from previous series but without making this book feel like it exists only as fan service.

Additionally, the character of Nawat has really grown on me.  I didn't really like Nawat in prior readings, at least not as a romantic interest; I preferred Aly with a character who shows up in the second book.  But his innocent charm and utter devotion to Aly has won me over after some time away from this book.  All of the characters here are actually excellent, with no one feeling superfluous or developed only at a superficial level.  I remember having a feeling about who the One Who Is Promised was the first time I read this book, and it's even more blatant reading it through again, and that's because Pierce does such a good job of the characterization here.

The one weakness that I think is here is that, in trying to loop in readers who aren't already familiar with Tortall, its characters, and its mythos, Pierce engages in a bit of infodumping.  Information about the Copper Isles actually seemed to be worked in pretty well as Aly discovered it, but info about Aly's homeland wasn't worked in very artfully.  This might have been a necessary tactic, since not all readers would have read the entirety of the Tortall books before getting to this one, but it still made the reading experience a bit jarring at points.

Overall, rereading this was an absolute delight, and I can't wait to dive into the second book once again.

4.5 stars out of 5.