Lucien Mulholland has terminal cancer. He's always tired, his body is weak, his thick black hair has fallen out, and he can't play the violin anymore.Lucien Mulholland has terminal cancer. He's always tired, his body is weak, his thick black hair has fallen out, and he can't play the violin anymore.
With little to cheer him up in his last days, Lucien is given an antique notebook - a very old antique, as in Renaissance Italian. Falling asleep with the notebook in his hand, he is transported to a magical place that is and yet isn't sixteenth-century Venice.
While he was terribly sick in England, Lucien is healthy and vital in this other world. In the city-on-a-marsh, Belezza, he quickly becomes a "mandolier" (gondolier) due to his good looks, an alchemist's apprentice since the alchemist recognizes him as an inter-world traveller, and a friend to Arianna, a girl with purple eyes and a hot temper. They call him Luciano there.
But when Lucien falls asleep in Belezza, he wakes up in England, and all is as it was before.
Then he falls asleep in England with the notebook and goes to Belezza again.
The Duchessa of Belezza is struggling to maintain her city's independence against the machinations of the di Chimici family from the north of the land of Talia, who have subjugated most of the other city-states.
The di Chimici, being of the villainous persuasion, want to control as much territory as they possibly can. They have heard rumors of another world with more advanced weaponry that they would love to harness. They know of travellers between the worlds called Stravagantes, and they would like to control these people and learn their secrets.
The Duchessa wants to protect the Stravagantes, for both political and personal reasons. She wants to keep their powers out of di Chimici hands, but also (view spoiler)[seeks to protect the alchemist Rudolfo. Years ago, she and Rudolfo were in love, but could not marry. They had a daughter, whom Sylvia (the Duchessa) bore in secret and gave away. (hide spoiler)]
The di Chimici are gunning for Rudolfo, and his young apprentice, Luciano, is also a target. And Luciano is easy to find, because he casts no shadow.
While there is peril in this story, the stakes never feel terribly high, and Hoffman is fond of deus ex machina and false alarms. The synopsis of the story sounds intense, but her pacing is so off and her narration so wordy that the plot becomes fuzzy. Sylvia and Arianna are instantly recognizable easily angered Italian women, but the other characters have mere scraps of personality, and even the two mentioned above are underdeveloped. The dialogue is so bland one senses even the characters are bored of it.
Hoffman's world-building is what keeps the pages turning. Her Talia emerges as a magical place, an impossibly romanticized and cleaned-up Renaissance Italian Wonderland - all duels and masquerades without the plagues and filthy streets that went with them.
But despite its beauty, Talia never becomes more than a dream-world. Its workings are poorly explained.
There is no solid explanation given for why this world sprang up parallel to ours but became frozen in the 1500s while ours kept marching on. There is also no explanation for why the chemical properties of silver and gold are reversed in Talia, or why a goddess-cult persists there a thousand years into the Christian Era.
Hoffman explains in her notes that there is no Protestant Reformation in her parallel world, because Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Edward VII were all the children of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon (!!!). Interesting, considering Catherine was well past childbearing years when Elizabeth was born and dead by the time Edward was. If she had been able to bear more healthy children than Mary, they might well have been named Elizabeth and Edward, but these would not have been interchangeable with Anne Boleyn's daughter and Jane Seymour's son. Hoffman is English; she should know this better than I.
This book is, by itself, very kid-friendly - assuming they can handle the terminal illness plotline. However, the later books in the series contain references to sex, drug abuse, bullying, and self-harm. REFERENCES. Nothing is shown. Hoffman isn't trying to glorifying bad behavior, but rather using it to illustrate an after-school special style point. I would caution parents and teachers with this. City of Masks is fine for a ten-year-old. The sequels are not.
Overall, a cute little book with an entertaining plot and a nice atmosphere, but the prose is so clumsy and the pacing so awkward that you feel like you're watching the story unfold through a foggy glass. This improves with subsequent outings in the series, which I read because I love all things Renaissance Italian. However, I can't guarantee that anyone else will want to stick around for them.
Long ago, the land of Alagaesia prospered under the guard of the Dragon Riders. They protected the country, keeping peace betwActual Rating: 2.5 stars
Long ago, the land of Alagaesia prospered under the guard of the Dragon Riders. They protected the country, keeping peace between humans, dragons, elves and dwarves.
But the Riders became complacent in their power. It only took one Rider's madness to topple the whole organization.
Now the mad Rider, Galbatorix, has been self-proclaimed Emperor for the last century or so. The other Riders are dead. The elves and dwarves have abandoned Alagaesia proper, working with human rebels, the Varden, on the edges of the Empire. In remote parts of the country, no one living has seen a dragon.
Eragon is a lad of fifteen, an orphan being raised by his uncle in the foothills of the forested Spine Mountains. He stumbles upon one of the last dragon eggs and takes it home, not knowing what it is. When the dragon hatches, she bonds with Eragon, but he has to hide her from both his family and the authorities. An inevitable disaster then pushes the youth and the dragon into the war...a war that only they can win.
Content Advisory Violence: Lots of fight scenes, mostly human combatants versus discount Orcs. Some gratuitous gore. Our hero narrowly escapes from a human sacrifice cult, although thankfully we don't see them sacrificing anyone. Later he comes upon a town where all the inhabitants were slaughtered, and there's a pile of corpses topped with an impaled baby. An elf is held prisoner and tortured, leaving awful injuries. A young man bears an ugly scar from when his father threw a sword at him.
Sex: Eragon has a bad case of insta-lust for the elf, Arya. When Murtagh tells Eragon that he's on the run from the Varden, the latter asks if he killed the wrong guy or "bedded the wrong woman."
Language: None.
Substance Abuse: There's a pointless scene where Eragon gets roaring drunk and wakes up wickedly hung-over. Saphira smugly asks him, "Have we learned a lesson?"
Politics and Religion: There's an Ancient Language that contains the true name of everything, and using these words in the proper arrangements produces magic. Evil beings called "Shades" get their magic powers from being possessed by demons.
There's the aforementioned human sacrifice cult, who worship in a building Paolini insists on calling a "cathedral." "Cathedral" is a word with specifically Christian connotations in the real world, which makes that episode of the story confusing.
Eragon meets a witch named Angela, who rolls dragon knucklebones to tell his fortune.
Nightmare Fuel: The aforementioned Shades look like grotesque vampires, which greying skin, scarlet eyes, and sharp teeth. EDIT: As my friend Whiteraven191 notes in the comments, Durza files his teeth, which is even more grotesque. Then there's the insectoid Eldritch abominations known as the Ra'zac, who seem nigh-impossible to defeat...
Conclusions Christopher Paolini was fifteen when he completed this doorstopper: an impressive feat. That said, this book would have been much better if Paolini had finished the manuscript, outlined the rest of the series, and put it away for a few years, then returned to it with a bit more maturity. Both the style and the content would have benefited greatly from that. Even a ruthless editor could have helped.
Unfortunately, Paolini's parents self-published Eragon as is and promoted it aggressively. Eventually Carl Hiaasen read it and put in a good word at Random House. This was in 2002, when high fantasy was enjoying a boom thanks to the Lord of the Rings films. Eragon became a bestseller buoyed by its aesthetic similarities to LOTR, its cool dragons, and the youth of its author.
And the book has its strengths. Compared to other YA bestsellers of the era, it succeeds where many of them fail. It's much more lively than its spiritual sister, The Naming, although The Naming has a lot more depth. It has a plot, unlike Twilight. It has more heart and soul than The Hunger Games, isn't nearly as elitist as Harry Potter or as rigidly stylized as the Lemony Snicket novels, has a much grander scope than Tamora Pierce's Tortall stories, isn't a diatribe aimed at a real-world religion like the Dark Materials trilogy, makes more sense than Inkheart, and never devolves into crassness the way Rick Riordan's demigod novels and Artemis Fowl could.
The main problem with Eragon is the immaturity of the writer, which shows in its derivative plots and settings, uninsightful characterizations, and bloated prose.
Many readers complain that the setting steals from Tolkien while the plot rips off Star Wars. I can see where those accusations come from, but I don't think they are entirely fair. While Paolini's dwarf kingdom of Farthen Dur is definitely based on Moria and Erebor, and I have a feeling that the elf kingdom in the woods will imitate Rivendell and Lothlorien, the rest of Alagaesia isn't all that close to any specific Middle-earth locale. Tolkien had an incredible gift for establishing setting; Paolini at age fifteen did not. Eragon's hometown of Carvahall is the most tangible place in this book, a backwater on the edge of a dangerous wilderness, and you can sense the growing unrest of the people who live there. The other human territories blur together.
As for the plot, George Lucas and his collaborators specifically developed the first Star Wars to be a distillation of the Campbellian Hero's Journey archetype. The plot was intentionally generic, the color was provided by the space setting and the unique worlds therein. So if a given story has plot similarities to A New Hope, that in itself is not cause for great alarm. If it turns out in Eldest that Durza the Shade was Eragon's father, then we can worry about ripping off Lucas.
Paolini's characters only resemble Lucas' in terms of their roles in the plot, anyway; they have very different personalities. When we first meet Luke Skywalker, he's whiny and a bit nosy, but overall, he's a sweet lad. Luke's darker side only emerges after the viewer knows what a good egg he is.
Eragon is no Luke. They have curiosity in common but that's about it. Eragon has a very intense temperament, which (understandably) goes into full-blown rage mode when his uncle is killed. This is a place where Paolini gains a point on Lucas; Luke has almost no reaction to the death of his uncle and aunt, Eragon is truly devastated by Uncle Garrow's loss and feels guilty for it, since he knows that the Ra'zac were looking for him and his dragon.
Unfortunately, Eragon's grief is melodramatic and loud--the way you write about the death of a family member when you've never experienced one. Grief is a cold, quiet thing that creeps in subtly; sometimes you forget it's there until you stumble upon a memento and it overwhelms you. It is not necessarily constant, and it is likelier to make you sad than angry.
We never really see Eragon being sad in a healthy way, and we never really see him forget himself and feel joy for a few moments either. He doesn't feel wonder when Brom starts teaching him magic. His friendship with Murtagh has an edge, and his crush on Arya is likewise edgy. He never opens his heart even to Saphira, his telepathically-bonded dragon. All this is fine, but it does make Eragon the character hard to like. His one endearing quality is his fascination with knots and hope to undo them some day, a nice bit of symbolism.
Murtagh is no Han Solo. Han is just trying to get by--underneath his cocky exterior, his heart is three sizes too big. He also has a sense of humor, which Murtagh has even less of than Eragon. Murtagh actually has emotional investment in the war, and avoids the Varden because he fears his parentage being known, not because he's reluctant to commit to a cause. He has a dark, simmering energy that reminds me of Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender. But he's almost redundant because Eragon himself is already a bundle of angst. Returning to the Star Wars comparison, I strongly suspect that Murtagh is Eragon's long-lost sibling, not Arya.
Which is a relief, because Arya is no Leia Organa, and her dynamic with Eragon is a lot different from that between Leia and Luke. Leia was stuck-up, certainly, but she was always snarky and upbeat too. She was actually able to help in her own rescue mission, and her general persona was sanguine and approachable. Arya is an elf, which automatically makes her aloof, but she spends most of the book in a self-induced magical coma, which slows down her character development and doesn't give her the chance to bond with the boys and Saphira.
There is no hint of attraction between Arya and Murtagh (who seems more interested in Nasuada, daughter of the Varden's top commander). But there is some chemistry between Arya and Eragon, who tries to wake her from her coma with magic, resulting in a telepathic bond. The flirtation between Luke and Leia was minor and innocent; even that notorious kiss was really only to make Solo jealous. Eragon and Arya have very different personalities that will hopefully lead to some entertaining friction in the rest of the series.
Saphira the dragon is a pretty good character. At first, her thoughts sound suitably alien, and become closer to human as the book goes on - which makes sense, because she's only been exposed to humans. But towards the end of the novel, Saphira's thoughts just echo Eragon's; she no longer shares any insights with him that he couldn't have reached himself, and often replies to his questions with "I don't know, maybe we'll find out." This almost makes her seem like his imaginary friend.
Brom's okay, but he's obviously Gandalf spliced with Obi-Wan and never develops his own distinct personality beyond that. (view spoiler)[His inevitable death is also staged in an abrupt and silly way, and I'll get into why the Ra'zac were the wrong characters to take him out. (hide spoiler)]
Roran, Nasuada, and Angela are placeholders. They're clearly going to be important later, but there's no much to say about them at the moment.
Galbatorix is never shown in person. His servants Durza and the Ra'zac are suitably frightening, but the man himself and his dragon remain unseen and rather ineffectual.
There's a few scenes that could definitely have been spruced up to accentuate the archetypal, mythic elements. When Brom (view spoiler)[takes an arrow that was meant for Eragon (hide spoiler)], it's rushed--the only rushed scene in the book is the one that actually needed to be dragged out more.
I would also argue that Brom should have survived till they reached Durza's dungeon, and perished at the hands of Durza, not the Ra'zac. The Ra'zac are certainly grotesque, but so alien that it's hard to even picture them. We already know that this is rehashing beats from The Fellowship of the Ring and A New Hope, so it seems natural that the mentor figure would die in the stronghold of evil, just as his two inspirations did. Finally, I find Durza more viscerally scary than the Ra'zac. This change could have made the book fifty pages shorter and made the final combat between Eragon and Durza more satisfying.
Likewise, while I thought Arya's coma was pretty dumb, it wouldn't have been so bad if she had woken herself up shortly after being rescued. But it makes no sense that Murtagh winds up carrying the comatose girl. Since the narrator has told us several times that Eragon is already preoccupied with her, he should be jumping at the chance to carry her himself - and a nice bridal-carry too, not slinging her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. And if Murtagh was the one to stab Durza, he should have his hands free anyway.
If Arya woke up much earlier, she could also have guided Saphira and the boys through the wilderness to the Varden and cut out a hundred pages of wandering around.
A more refined prose style would have minimized the flaws of the story and maximized its strengths. But Eragon is so verbose that the narration can jar you out of the story. Paolini fishes obscure words out of the thesaurus when a common one would do just fine, and the story would flow better for it. He also compulsively overdescribes background characters and settings, as if afraid that we can't picture the scene unless every detail is filled in. Tolkien loved to set the stage too, but he knew how to weave the description in with subtlety. Here, the narrative can grind to a halt for paragraphs because Paolini has to be sure we know the exact proportions of Horst's kitchen table.
In conclusion, this isn't a horrible novel. The story is familiar, but still rather swashbuckling, and the characters and setting have potential. It's just a mess - you can tell that it was written by a teenager, and makes a lot of rookie/first draft errors. Good editing and rearranging some events could have made the book shorter and punchier; some advice from a more mature reader could have given it more emotional heft. As is, I'm interested enough to see where the story goes next, but the sizeable flaws have put up a wall between the reader and the story that shouldn't be there. It's not horrible, but it doesn't live up to its full potential either....more
In the small but never-ending discussion of whether or not there do exist any female characters in YA fantasy novels to balance out the insipidity of In the small but never-ending discussion of whether or not there do exist any female characters in YA fantasy novels to balance out the insipidity of Bella Swan and her innumerable clones, you will probably hear Tamora Pierce name-dropped more than almost any other author. I enjoy Pierce’s work, but I feel that this recommendation needs a caveat or two—especially regarding her first-written and still-most popular series, The Song of the Lioness. Alanna is the first book in this series and is sometimes given the rather clunky, longer title of Alanna: The First Adventure.
Part I: Setting
Tortall is where we lay our scene. This magical pseudo-medieval kingdom leans more toward pseudo-Renaissance than pseudo-Celtic. It has its share of strange customs, which we’ll discuss later, but there isn’t anything here too savage or startling to modern sensibilities. There is also magic going on, but the emphasis (in this series at least) is on humans—kings and queens and knights, mostly—and overall, it feels more like Narnia than Middle-earth.
Possessing a magical Gift (always with a capital G) is here treated sort of like being good at math or having a pleasant singing voice. It tends to run in families, especially aristocratic ones. It is valued, but it is not the end-all to existence. As we’ll see in the Protector of the Small series, Giftless people in Tortall can still be heroes, unlike in some other series I could name (*cough* Harry Potter *cough*). Pierce’s folks don’t have to bother much with incantations; spellcasting is more likely to involve a few simple words combined with conjuring supernatural fire, which is almost always the same color as the eyes of the conjurer.
There’s another happy talent called the Sight. Sighted people can’t work magic themselves, but they can always see through glamours and spells, which unsighted people can’t do.
Despite otherwise resembling a Renaissance European culture, Tortall is a polytheistic state. This pantheon supposedly includes hundreds of gods who show up throughout this series and into the ones that followed. In this series, the gods don’t do a whole lot except encourage Alanna and give her stuff. The chief deity is a Goddess, always spelled with a capital G.
A goddess may run the universe, but down on Earth women don’t have much power. If you’re a noblewoman, you can either marry young into a good family or you can first go to the Goddess’ cloisters and become a mage. Sure, there are lady knights mentioned in folklore and history, but respectable girls don’t do that sort of thing nowadays. There’s no penalty for someone trying, though. Alanna risks her reputation to train, but she’s not risking her life*.
*At least, the King will not have her executed if her secret gets out. Obviously plenty of other people want to kill our heroine, or else there would be no story.
Tortallans tend to be fussy about rank. We’ll see a lot more of this in Protector of the Small #3. It doesn’t come up in the Alanna novels much. Like the English, they are very hung up on class but don’t really notice race.
Tortallan cultural mores are a tad inconsistent. People worry that a lady knight wouldn’t behave like a proper gentlewoman, but at the same time no one is offended to learn that an unmarried person is sexually active, and magical contraceptives are available to just about everyone. It’s unfortunate Pierce feels the need to put so much emphasis on those last two subjects. She does not go into graphic details, but I’m uncomfortable recommending these books to a nine-year-old, even though Alanna is in every other respect an excellent role model. There isn’t much of that in this, book I, but the three subsequent volumes are very attached to this plot point.
I remember reading an interview with Pierce where she stated that she tries to avoid the common fantasy pitfall of character- and place-names with seventeen syllables and accents and umlauts and what have you. She does an excellent job of avoiding these. In fact, you could argue that she goes too far to the other extreme: for example, the desert city where the climax occurs is named Persopolis. (Also, it’s hard for me to believe a handsome blue-eyed man named Roger is an arch-villain. I just keep picturing Roger Taylor or Roger Daltrey, and that ruins the mood).
Part II: The Story
So in the land of Tortall is a province called Trebond. Lord Trebond has been sad and out-of-touch since his wife died delivering twins eleven years ago, and he is so emotionally unavailable to his son and daughter that they have no real relationship with him.
The boy is Thom, whom his father intends for the knighthood but would rather devote his life to the study of magic. The girl is Alanna, who will be shipped off to learn magic and proper-lady stuff at the convent but wants to become a warrior.
Like many literary boy-and-girl twins, Thom and Alanna so strongly resemble each other that even the servants who raised them aren’t always sure which is which. Since the kids are prepubescent, this isn’t actually that far-fetched. As adults, the two still look alike but could never be mistaken for each other.
On the day they get shipped out, Alanna and Thom switch places and are well on their way to their respective paths of destiny by the time anyone is the wiser—including their father, who apparently is just that oblivious. Lucky for them that their father rarely went to court, so no one can verify that he has one son and one daughter instead of two sons.
Accompanied by her faithful manservant Coram, “Alan” enters the capitol city, Corus, and begins training as a page in the royal household. She has repeated nasty run-ins with a cowardly bully named Ralon, who soon gets expelled for bad behavior (which comes back to haunt certain people later), but overall everyone is very nice to her. She develops a particular friendship with Jonathan, the handsome young Crown Prince, and the big, boisterous Raoul of Goldenlake.
Tiny Alanna has to work hard to master various weapons, but master them she does, impressing everyone with her determination and work ethic. She also has a strong magical Gift, strong enough to rescue Jonathan from dying of a plague that sweeps the city halfway through the book. It’s no surprise that she comes to the attention of the new magic teacher, Jonathan’s cousin Duke Roger of Conté. *Cue ominous music*
It should not surprise anyone reading this that the sophisticated, handsome Roger is determined to destroy his young cousin and seize the crown. This is obvious to the reader from the beginning, but most of the characters, under Roger’s spell, are shocked by the very idea. (At first this looks like lazy writing, but Pierce offers a good explanation at the end of book two).
Alanna’s magic sense tells her something is off about Roger, but what? Her solving the mystery—and the confrontation naturally following such a discovery—are put off till book two.
This installment ends with Roger sending Jon and “Alan” into a trap, a one-off appearance by some terrifying supernatural entities, and a magic-induced wardrobe malfunction that reveals Alanna’s true gender to Jonathan. He’s seventeen. She’s thirteen. I’m sure you can guess where this is going—but it takes till the next book to get there, too.
Also, there is a thief running around. The King of Thieves, to be precise. His name is George Cooper. He’s in his late teens and a good friend to Alanna, and you are going to see a lot more of him as the series goes on.
Part III: Content Advisory for Parents, Teachers and Sensitive Kids
Alanna gets her period over the course of the book. She makes a midnight run for the nearest healer-woman (who happens to be George’s mom) and they spend what feels like an awkwardly long time discussing puberty, birds and bees. Alanna is here given an amulet that will ward off pregnancy that she can throw away at any time if she decides she wants kids. This exchange took up about five pages in the mass market paperback I got from the library, and is probably even shorter in a trade edition. It doesn’t come up again in this book, but in the three sequels the amulet pays for itself repeatedly, if you get my drift.
I can’t speak for every kid, but this part freaked me out pretty bad when I was a twelve-year-old reading the book for the first time.
Also, the evil beings haunting the city of Persopolis, trying to make Jon and “Alan” turn on each other, cause the girl’s clothing to disintegrate, revealing her female body. Jon is at first too shocked to get horny, but the stage is set for their…uh…relationship upgrade in book two.
Ralon is violent in a schoolyard bully way, but no more frightening as a character than Moe from Calvin and Hobbes. (This is no longer the case when he reappears in book four). There’s no gore to speak of.
A plague goes through the city about halfway through the book, killing off a lot of minor characters. Pierce doesn’t go into the details of how the virus works, but anyone with a vague knowledge of medieval diseases can fill in all the nasty blanks.
The supernatural beings in this book are a bit spooky. We first meet them when Alanna uses her magic to stop Jonathan from dying of plague. Others appear in the trap of Persopolis. They all give off a very pagan vibe, which might be uncomfortable to some conservative Judeo-Christian readers.
Pretty much all the characters use magic, to varying degrees. As stated earlier, Pierce largely ignores incantations in favor of personal energies and telekinesis-type stuff.
There is no substance abuse or foul language.
Part IV: Is It Any Good?
Alanna is a flawed and likeable kid: plucky, determined, impulsive, loyal, a bit bratty, and not always perceptive. Clearly Pierce was influenced by the classic YA heroines—Jo March, Laura Ingalls, Anne Shirley, and Scout Finch—and while Alanna isn’t as developed or morally reliable as they, she’s worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as them, which is far more than can be said for any of Stephanie Meyer’s or Cassandra Clare’s heroines.
Pierce’s greatest strength is her heroines, followed by her invariably likeable supporting casts. Jon, Raoul, Sir Myles, and especially George, are great fun to read about. Tortall is an interesting place full of deities and political intrigue, and this only gets better as the books go on.
However, this book has very little plot tying all the characters together. Something happens, time passes, then something else happens. The conflagration at the end is pretty exciting, but the rest of the book is more a school story in a fantasy setting than epic high fantasy. If you want nonstop action, look elsewhere.
Also, the world-building is hazy in spots, showing that this is Pierce really didn’t know the terrain of Tortall very well herself back then. For example, Alanna being the only person remotely suspicious of Roger. At the end of book two, this is revealed to be accidental, but for the duration of this one it looks like Mary Sue.
On the subject of Mary Sues, it will likely annoy more sophisticated readers that all the good characters like Alanna right away, and only the bad ones (Ralon, Roger) dislike her. She is also a petite, pretty little thing with purple eyes and red hair. I kept picturing Hayley Williams with Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes.
Pierce’s prose in this volume can be downright clunky. In chapter one, for example, she ends two consecutive sentences with the word “anything.” There’s a fair amount of obvious statements (“Alanna was angry,” that sort of thing) and one or two too many exclamation points.
Finally, anyone who thinks C.S. Lewis’ political and religious views came through too strongly in the Chronicles of Narnia needs to read this, because Pierce makes Lewis look sneaky and subtle by comparison. At some points, especially when Mistress Cooper gives Alanna The Talk, one wonders if Pierce really intended to write a novel for the story’s sake, or if she’s trying to sell ‘60s feminism and the Sexual Revolution to the younger generations.
Conclusion
Pierce’s Tortall books overall are worthwhile young adult fiction, but Alanna is an awkward piece: the story is fun and the main character engaging, but the prose is shaky in places, the plot negligible, and the author’s politics occasionally flash obviously and abrasively into view. I recommend it for readers ages 14 and up…mainly because it sets up the highly entertaining Immortals Quartet and the excellent Protector of the Small.
You might also like… • The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, which I sincerely hope you have already read • The Secret Country trilogy by Pamela Dean • The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner • The Books of Bayern by Shannon Hale • Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine • The Crown & Court duology by Sherwood Smith • The Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix • The Tiffany Aching books by Terry Pratchett • The Stravaganza series by Mary Hoffman • Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale • Vessel by Sarah Beth Durst...more
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