Literary Lions

[freckles_and_doubt]

Following a vague recommendation from someone-or-other, I completely forget who, I've spent chunks of the last few weeks scientifically investigating the works of Tamora Pierce. Pierce is a writer of young adult fantasy, and I was interested in her because she does some quite deliberate things with feminist themes and strong women negotiating medieval, male-dominated societies. It's been a slightly ambivalent reading experience. She's easy to read, and I find myself mentally classing her stories with the Anne McCaffrey Dragonsinger ones in terms of their tendency towards wish-fulfilment and cute-creature-hugging; I also worry a little about a potentially slightly facile feminism. Nonetheless I'm left overall with a strong sense that her Tortall series is a worthwhile project that does something necessary in terms of role models for teenage girls.

The first Tortall series follows Alanna, who wants to train as a knight but has to disguise herself as a boy to do so. The disguised-as-a-boy bit is not treated realistically at all: young Alan should have been discovered posthaste and probably raped. But the urgency of the girl's need to fulfil a role not prescribed for her by her society is very apparent, and you end up rooting for her throughout. It's clearly an early work; the book's writing is a bit halting at times (she definitely gets better over time) and the magic/fighting combination is a little too idealised. The subsequent series which focuses on Keladry, the first girl to actually train openly as a knight, is stronger, more straightforwardly mundane and far more realistic as well as better written.

Good Things: solid detail in fighting, war, tactics (I am so an SCA geek); training is hard work, particularly for girls trying to overcome the strength deficit compared to boys. Prejudice against girls fighting. Page hazing rituals. Social awareness: the feudal system's privilege is neatly deconstructed in Keladry's story. Good teaching. Realistic teen romance! ye gods, how rare is it for teens in y.a. books to (a) play around with sex (b) sensibly (c) in a valid emotional context and (d) with a shifting series of partners, crushes and relationships. Death to the One Troo Love! JK Rowling's bloody saccharine Epilogue, take that!
Bad Things: clunky writing at times, narrative hiccups, falters and rushes. Slightly Shakespearian gender-swapping unrealisms. Too much cutesy power, too many cutesy people, not quite enough grey between heroes and villains. Bloody magically-enhanced animal deus ex machinas, although I can completely see these appealing to the teen girl demographic.

In completely another area of the young-girl-protagonist spectrum, Cathrynne M. Valente has posted the final chapter of her wonderful fairy tale, the one with September and the leopard and the wyverary A-through-L. And the soap golem. Baumish. Nesbitesque. Thurberoid. Other good things, including unexpected and off-beat and occasionally very cruel. Definitely well worth a read, particularly now that the whole thing's up.