Book review
It makes me sad that my bookclub friends did not like the Alanna books. If they had read them as kids I know they would have loved them. To some degree I can see how they did not enjoy these books as adults. They were Pierce’s first published books and so they are not as polished or flushed out as her later ones are. At the time, she was confined by the industry to some degree: what publishers thought would sell and what middle readers could handle. It wasn’t as though self-publishing was an option in the mid-80s.
I get that a lot of my current enjoyment of these books is nostalgia. I do not feel any of those faults that my bookclub friends do. To me, the world is fully flushed out with myriad characters and mythology and culture. I can see the time jumps, but, again, at the time there was no Harry Potter as proof of concept to take Alanna through each year slowly. That would have been AMAZING and, dare I say, way better than Harry Potter (sorry, guys). But that is not how things happened. Instead, I met Alanna when she was able to have a profound impact on my life, and I’ll be forever grateful to Ms. Pierce for that.
And, I’m sorry, but as much as we talk about badass female characters today, Alanna is the original badass. She’s realistic, flawed, and completely relatable. She is a bit of a special snowflake, but not really. The Goddess (hey, by the way GODDESS!!) blessed her because of the choices Alanna made – and hard ones at that. If she had taken the easy path and just went to the monastery to become a proper lady, do you really think the Goddess would have interacted with her the same way? No. Alanna drove her own destiny, which is such a beautiful message for young women. She is gifted in magic, but as a girl, she was smaller and weaker, which means that she had to work harder to prove her abilities and THAT is how she became one of the best fencers. A lot of hard work, not because of any innate, special ability. Another great message. I’ve heard comments, too, about how she doesn’t demonstrate any character growth. If you do not take all four books together, I can kind of see that, but over the course of the four books, she softens. She had to be so hard and so determined to achieve what she wanted in life. Something that she wasn’t supposed to want and wasn’t supposed to be able to manage. Yet another great message. She did grow up and learned to be okay with who she was (a girl) and that she didn’t have to be anyone other than she was. She learns that lesson through the love and relationships that she experiences as she grows. Which leads me to the ‘love triangle.’ First of all, the driving action of these stories is most assuredly not a love story and, again, that is a nice change of pace for most books published today. But, c’mon, she is 15/16/17 (I think she’s 18 when she does the Ordeal) in this book. She’s going to have relationships, physical and otherwise, at this point. It makes TOTAL sense at this point in her development. But she isn’t blinded by love. She doesn’t lose herself or her purpose because she gets a little giddy around a boy. Again, realistic. At that age, I went through boys pretty quickly and more than once I had to choose between a couple.
Anyway, I so adore these books. I love revisiting this land. I find it so full and beautiful and relatable and these books are so much better in terms of messages than the vast majority of books I read today. My 5 star rating stays.
- Goodreads rating – 4.23
- REVIEW – Marilyn