Waiting on Wednesday (23)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. So here's a thing I'm looking forward to: Battle Magic, by Tamora Pierce (September 24, 2013, from Scholastic Press).

On their way to the first Circle temple in Gyongxi, mages Briar, Rosethorn, and Evvy pay a visit to the emperor's summer palace. Although treated like royalty when they first arrive, the mages soon discover that the emperor plans to invade Gyongxi, posing a fatal threat to the home temple of the Living Circle religion. Accompanied by one of the emperor's prize captives, the three mages rush to Gyongxi to warn its citizens of the impending attack. With the imperials hot on their trail, Briar, Rosethorn, and Evvy must quickly help the country prepare for battle. But even with the help of new allies, will their combined forces be enough to fight the imperial army and win the war?

*****

I am a diehard fan of Tamora Pierce. I remember seeing her first series, the Song of the Lioness, in the teen section of my local library when I was in high school--but I didn't read it then, because for some bizarre reason they never seemed to have book one. It's book two I remember seeing on the shelf.

And I was the kind of library patron whose theoretical existence drives me crazy now that I work in that same library: I never ever asked the librarians for anything, not even whether they might possibly be able to get the first book of this series I was interested in reading. (For the longest time, though I was also a diehard fan of Katherine Kurtz, I couldn't finish her Camber of Culdi trilogy, because the library owned book one and book three but not book two. Did I ask the librarians about that one? Indeed, I did not.)

But I digress. I finally read the Song of the Lioness in my early twenties, I think, at college or maybe in library school, and found it the kind of series I was quite likely to finish and immediately begin again. A lot of her books are like that for me; I sink right in, no matter how many times I've read them before. The Circle books aren't as immersive for me as the various Tortall series, but I'm still very much looking forward to this one.

Terrier

Tamora Pierce mentioned the Provost's Dogs, the proto-police force of her pseudo-medieval city of Corus, in her very first novel about the fantasy kingdom of Tortall, Alanna: The First Adventure.  She hasn't said much about them since, but in her new series she delves into the history of the Provost's Guard.  Beka Cooper is a rookie in the Guard--since they're the Dogs, she's a Puppy--learning to walk the fine line between law and justice on one side and workable corruption on the other, always keeping in mind that her first responsibility is to the people of her district, where she grew up.

Interesting departure for Pierce in some ways: her first foray into first-person narration, for one thing.  Most of her books have been about knights or mages, both in their own ways elite classes even when they came to their current status from a background of poverty; this one looks at the city's poorer class from the inside.  This is also her first prequel series, set two hundred years before her other Tortall books, in the age of the lady knights who had become legend long before Alanna disguised herself as a boy to train as a page.

But I have some problems with the character of Beka; she's too smart, and gets too much respect for a rookie, and her announced character flaw of extreme shyness hardly slows her down at all in practice.  When her training partners refer to her as "the sharpest Puppy of all" the dreaded words Mary Sue inevitably sprang to mind. 

Not that this is going to stop me from reading the rest of the series.

Originally posted at MySpace 12/2/06

The Will of the Empress

The four young mages who learned to work as a team in Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series, then went their separate ways and took on students of their own in the Circle Opens set, come together again.  Noble-born Sandrilene has been content to draw the income from her estates in the empire of Namorn as an absentee landlord, while leaving their day-to-day management in the capable hands of a cousin, but Sandry has another cousin in Namorn: the Empress Berenene, who is becoming increasingly insistent that her young kinswoman take up residence in her ancestral home.  Sandry agrees to visit for the summer, but Berenene intends the visit to be permanent; when Sandry's foster sisters and brother accompany her, Berenene soon recognizes that they too would be assets to the Empire.  And the Empress is not used to having her will disobeyed.

The four central characters of this series continue to grow and mature, as they have throughout the previous eight books.  They're eighteen in this one, so this volume is aimed at older readers than the previous entries; the question of Sandry's marriage is a central theme, and Daja and Briar both carry on romances of their own.  For the most part, though, the intrigues of the imperial court take center stage.

An excellent book, as usual for Tamora Pierce.  I'm not sure if this is meant to be a stand-alone novel or the first of another four-book set; I suspect the latter, since this one (like the first volumes of the previous two sets) was chiefly about Sandry, leaving the others' entry to adulthood for subsequent volumes.  Lots of fun either way, though.

Originally posted at MySpace on 12/24/05.