Well, that was a ridiculously quick 582 pages. I expected to take at least three to four days to get through it, but as soon I started, I just couldn’t seem to stop reading. I think I finished it in a little over a day.
Terrier is the first in Tamora Pierce’s latest young adult series, Beka Cooper (sometimes also known as Provost’s Dog). It takes place about 200 years before Alanna: The First Adventure (which was Pierce’s first book, and the first of The Song of the Lioness quartet), in the kingdom of Tortall, and it follows an ancestor of a character from that first series, George Cooper. George’s ancestor is the titular Beka, a lower-class girl with some spooky magical abilities and a fierce desire to follow her foster-father into the Provost’s Dogs, a sort of police force that roams the city day and night.
Terrier is told in journal format by Beka herself, supposedly as a way for her to practice remembering and recording details. Beka’s journal starts on her first official day of training as a Puppy (they really take the Dog metaphor seriously), where she is paired up with two senior Dogs, Goodwin and Tunstall, who patrol the Lower City during Evening Watch (late afternoon to one in the morning). The journal format is a bit of a stretch, especially in the last two books (but I’ll get to that in my review of the third one, probably), but I was so engaged in the story I was willing to ignore my problems with it. We’re right alongside Beka as she learns to do her Dog work, hobble (arrest) Rats (criminals), and utilize her skills and advantages to get her job done.
Being from the Lower City originally and having made it out (thanks to her foster father, the Lord Provost), she is intimately familiar with her territory and the people who live there, and in addition, she has a bit of wild magic in her that allows her to speak to the dead (who are carried on the backs of the Black God’s messengers — pigeons — until they feel ready to pass on). She can also speak to dust spinners, which I feel like Pierce invented herself, because they’re so weird. They’re basically living dust storms who are permanently stuck in one location and who pick up and store the sounds around them, including conversations. These are Becca’s ‘Birdies’, and they lead to several breaks in the two big cases she’s involved in solving during her training. Those cases are Beka’s proving ground — with her partners, she hunts down the person responsible for over thirty child abductions (and some murders, when they didn’t get the ransom they were after), and uncovers a mysterious plot involving fire opals (a very rare and expensive gem).
The mystery/procedural element of this was probably my favorite part, especially mixed with the fun of first book fantasy worldbuilding. (This book is much more urban fantasy than any of Pierce’s others.) There’s a lot to explore with Beka’s world, and Beka’s training is a good way for us to experience it all for the first time. It was also really interesting to see the disconnect between our type of policing and Beka’s (Beka’s involves the accepting of bribes, the occasional hanging out with known Rats, and allowing basically a King Rat called The Rogue who keeps control over the city’s crimes, putting a little order on the chaos, as it were). This book is also notable for Pierce’s creation of a sort of street lingo. Beka and her associates and friends call girls and women ‘mots,’ men ‘coves,’ etc. It’s perhaps a bit too pervasive (I feel like she would say ‘girl’ or ‘woman’ or ‘man’ at least occasionally). Terrier also had a good cast of secondary characters, and Beka’s talking cat Pounce is sassy and wonderful.
It was also interesting to see Pierce write about a world where women are pretty much equal to men in terms of the jobs they can hold and the way they’re treated, especially considering Alanna’s very premise was founded on the concept that in order for her to become a knight, she would have to dress up like a boy. And this book takes place two hundred years BEFORE that one, so how did Tortallan society degrade that much? Perhaps as a consequence, she spends a lot more time focusing on class issues. This book is really the first time we’ve spent a significant part of the plot with someone other than Tortallan nobles, and this book is almost nothing but. Even in The Immortals quartet, where Daine is of the lower class, she very quickly ends up constantly hob-knobbing it with nobles of all sorts.
I’ve been making my way through the Tortall books since 2011, and it’s been really interesting to see how Pierce’s writing has grown since Alanna, but stayed true to her voice at the same time. It’s especially jarring to think about the simple prose of Alanna, the watered down juvenile writing and the condensed length of those books in comparison with the complexity of this, the chances she takes with style and language, the adult themes she is allowed to work with now. She slowly reached this point over a period of years, but putting the two side by side really highlights the differences.
Reviews of books two and three will be up hopefully pretty soon.
