Trickster's Queen - Tamora Pierce (Daughter of the Lioness #2)

I wasn't actually planning on reading Trickster's Queen so soon after reading Trickster's Choice, but after a few books that were just "meh," I found myself in a bit of a reading slump.  And when I'm in a reading slump, I like to go back to books that I know I enjoy to get me out of it.

What struck me immediately upon re-reading Trickster's Queen is its great disconnect from the first book.  It picks up several months and much character development after Choice, which Pierce tries to bridge with a couple pages of prologue that is essentially all info-dump about what the characters have been doing in the interim.  However, the effect of this is that it feels like this is the third book in a trilogy in which the second book is missing.  Most of the development of Aly's relationship with Nawat, which was so sweet and charming in the first book, is just skipped over; so is Aly's building of her position as spymaster for the growing rebellion.

On the whole, however, this book has less infodumping than the first one.  The prologue is the vast majority of it, and the narrative itself is less interrupted with intermittent infodumps than Choice was.  Additionally, I think this one does a better job of building the environment, culture, and overall feel of the Copper Isles.  Aly also really has room to come into her own and show off her skills in this book, rather than scampering to use them while also hiding them as she had to in the first book.  Tensions come to a head regarding Sarai, and the twist that's hinted at all along finally actually happens.  Dove continues to be an excellent character, far wiser than her years, and the integration of many of the side characters is done very well.  The other minor flaw that comes to mind is that the end does feel a bit rushed; Pierce lists off a list of casualties, one of which was a major-minor character (if that makes sense) in the first book and then was just brushed aside in the second and then written off as a sacrifice of the rebellion.  With all of the build-up to the rebellion, it just seems to be over in remarkably few pages, and then the epilogue just feels a bit off as well, though I can't quite put my finger on why.

Overall, this is a good book; I definitely enjoyed re-reading it.  However, I don't think that it's as good as the first book in the duology.  It feels disconnected from the first part of the story, and the ending also feels rushed and off-kilter with the rest of the book.  The body has a good feel and good characters and a good plot, but without a strong beginning or end, I don't think it can be stronger than the first book.

4 stars out of 5.

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.

Squire - Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small #3)

Tamora Pierce was one of my favorite authors growing up.  The first book of hers was actually the second one of this particular series, Page, which I got in a stack of books one of my mother's coworkers gave to me, because someone had given them to her niece, who wasn't a reader.  I didn't even realize it was a series until a couple of years later, when I found this one at a book store!  Pierce has written a lot of books, most of them middle-grade but some of them trending into the young adult category, and all of them about awesome girls and women doing awesome things.  She has a few male main characters, but overall she is very much a girl power author.  This particular book is one of my favorites of hers, and I'd decided to read it for the "A book you loved as a child" category of my 2017 reading challenge.  And since I've been horribly sick the past few days, and being sick always makes me nostalgic for things from when I was sick when I was little (Campbell's chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, anyone?) this seemed like a great time to read it.

The main character in the Protector of the Small series is Keladry of Mindelan, a young woman training to be the second female knight in over a century, and the first to actually train openly as female.  In this third book, Kel has passed out of her time as a page and into the status of a squire, needing to train directly under a knight, though she suspects that no one will choose her because she's "The Girl."  Luckily for her, someone does pick her--Raoul of Goldenlake and Malorie's Peak, the commander of the King's Own (kind of like a mini-army/National Guard sort of thing) and a legend in his own right.  Though Kel dreamed of being the squire of Alanna the Lioness, she knows it's not possible and is thrilled to be Raoul's squire, travelling with the Own and helping those across Tortall.  Along the way, she fights a centaur, rescues a baby griffin that she ends up stuck with, and encounters many characters that appeared in the series preceding this one, such as Alanna herself, Raoul himself, Daine the Wildmage, Numair Salmalin, and so on.  Those slightly-more-than-cameos are one of the reasons I find this particular book to be so enjoyable.  Raoul is an amazing character, a knight who respects Kel for her own worth but doesn't force it upon others and instead helps her to earn respect, though it's often hard-won.

In this series, Kel faces the many challenges of being a girl in what is essentially a man's world.  When Alanna won her shield, she did it disguised as a boy.  Kel, being openly female, faces harassment, gossip, destruction of her property, even the kidnapping of one of her servants in an attempt to make her quit her training.  Kel faces all of this with a cool exterior, even when it enrages her on the inside.  She fights for respect both for herself and for those who are unable to fight for it themselves--hence the "Protector of the Small" name of the series.  Kel is such a great character, being an outsider in so many ways but being unwilling to give up on her dreams or her duties.  When I was little, I wanted to be Kel.  She fights with a glaive, which inspired me to give one of my own main characters a glaive as a weapon.  She knows how to fight with a normal staff as well; I distinctly remember swinging around a broom handle in the front yard, many times, practicing what I imagined to be Kel's staff fighting.  I desperately wanted to be as awesome as Kel is.  I still do, and the very battered, much-read condition of the book shows it.

That said, I haven't read this is in years, and it's definitely a little rougher than I remember.  It was Pierce's third series, and one thing that's cool about her writing is that you can see how she grows as a writer over the course of them.  This book is a little less than four hundred pages long, and it covers four years of Kel's life and her entire time as a squire--that's a lot of ground to cover in a small amount of pages.  As such, she has to do a good amount of exposition and skipping over things, and that isn't always done in the smoothest manner.  She also does a lot of re-hashing of things that happened in the previous books, which I don't really think is necessary in a series.  Additionally, this isn't a book that has a strong central plot.  It's about Kel's time as a squire, but there's not really a single compelling motive here beyond that.  That's something that's pretty prevalent throughout this particular series, thought the fourth book does have a central plot revolving around more than just Kel's general struggles.  This one does set up well for the fourth book, though, with the escalation of hostilities with Scanra and the introduction of the enchanted metal killing machines.

This was such a fast, nostalgic read, and I really enjoyed it once again.  As much as when I was younger?  Maybe not quite that much, but I still think it's an excellent book and compensates well for its weaknesses, and is such a great book for girls in need of a role model who does something other than think about boys.  (Kel does think about boys, but her life far from revolves around them.  Pierce's attitudes towards her heroines and sex, that they engage in it but do so of their own free will and while taking proper precautions, is something that I think is very important to include in books for this age group.)

4 stars out of 5.

Battle Magic - Tamora Pierce (The Circle Opens #3)

I was so disappointed by this book.  Tamora Pierce is one of my favorite authors, and I had such high expectations for Battle Magic because everything Pierce writes is normally of very high quality.  In this case, however, I feel like she fell very, very flat.  Part of this is the nature of the book.  It's an "in between" book, a book that happens between two other books but is written and released after them; in this case, Battle Magic comes after Street Magic but before Melting Stones and The Will of the Empress.  Now, doing short stories and novellas in between other works is all the rage these days, but Battle Magic doesn't fit that description.  It's a full-fledged novel, at well over 400 pages.  But, having devoured everything Pierce has written, including Melting Stones and The Will of the Empress, I already had an idea--a pretty good one--of what happened in this book.  That didn't deter me.  I re-read books all the time, and knowing what's going to happen isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Good writing an easily compensate for that.  But in this case, I felt that the writing just...wasn't...good.

It absolutely breaks my heart to say that, but it's true.  Pierce spent this book fleshing out a conflict mentioned in Melting Stones and The Will of the Empress, between two countries that seem to be very loosely based on China and Tibet.  Gyongxe is like Tibet: a high mountain country that is one of the holiest lands in the world, a place where the gods are closer.  Yanjing is like Imperial China, and wants to take over Gyongxe.  Now, these two countries aren't copy-and-paste representations of their real-world "counterparts," but it's easy to see where the inspiration came from, especially in the beginning.  As the book goes on, Pierce fleshes out the countries more and more (this is something she's so good at) and the differences become more marked, the distance between reality and fantasy wider.  That's as it should be.  Pierce also incorporates a wonderful magic system that we haven't seen before, based on teamwork and shamanism rather than the individual mages featured in her other books.  And all the hallmarks of a great, gritty fantasy are there: an invading force, a defending country, a small group of people trying to make a difference, and such wonderful magic.  But then it just fell apart.

Going into this book, I knew things wouldn't go well.  I knew, for example, that there was going to be torture; Evvy talks about her feet being caned in Melting Stones.  "Wow," I thought.  "Pierce is really getting grown up with this one."  But she didn't.  There's a short torture scene, but I felt it lacked real emotion.  I felt that most of the pivotal scenes in this book lacked the emotion that Pierce is normally so good at portraying.  Big, pivotal moments were brushed over and skipped.  It felt like Pierce couldn't decide if she was writing an advanced young-adult fantasy or one for much younger readers, and that muddle really got in the way of enjoyment.  And the end...which is a literal deus ex machina.  Pierce's characters normally have such agency and direction in her books, and in this one they were just dragged about and didn't really affect anything, especially at the end.  Without them, everything would likely have been pretty much the same, and that was disappointing.

This was most definitely not Pierce's strongest work, and considering that I waited so long to read it, I was extra disappointed.  Some of the settings and magic were lovely, and we actually get some scenes from Rosethorn's perspective, which was nice, but so much was just...missing.  I'm very, very sad about this.

2 stars out of 5.